


You Won't Be Going Alone

by de_scientia



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Angst and Feels, Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Male Character, Bloodline Fuckery, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Character Death, Devotion, Episode Ignis Verse 2, M/M, Mutual Pining, Noct's reaction could probably be better but it's not the absolute worst, Nonbinary Character, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Prophecy Loophole, Prophecy Subversion, Sacrifice, Sexuality Crisis, Temporary Character Death, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-01
Updated: 2020-02-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:42:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22442008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/de_scientia/pseuds/de_scientia
Summary: Ten years after Eos was first blanketed in darkness, the King of Light has returned as prophesied. However, Ignis is not content to allow the gods to take Noctis’s life as payment for the actions of another, and will do whatever it takes to avoid that outcome. Even if it means sacrificing himself.
Relationships: Gladiolus Amicitia & Ignis Scientia, Gladiolus Amicitia & Prompto Argentum & Noctis Lucis Caelum & Ignis Scientia, Iris Amicitia & Noctis Lucis Caelum, Noctis Lucis Caelum & Ignis Scientia, Noctis Lucis Caelum/Ignis Scientia
Comments: 10
Kudos: 54
Collections: The Ignoct Big Bang 2019





	1. Chapter 1

Noct was home. 

Well, he wasn’t yet, but he was on his way. It was when Ignis was out hunting in the Leide Highlands that he had received the call, when his muscles ached with the strain of days-long combat and everything on his person was coated with grime and the thick black miasma that passed for daemonic blood. When he withdrew his lance from the armiger, an action he had been performing without thought for nearly fifteen years, and noticed a most peculiar reaction. It came too readily, pulled too easily. Then the call came. 

_Talcott found him._

Noct was home.

With nothing more than the instruction to expect him “a decade hence” and a very nonverbal canine messenger providing any further guidance, they had resorted to simply fanning out and keeping their eyes peeled whilst about other business in hopes of one day stumbling upon some sign of his return. More oft than not, that business was the ever-uphill battle of clearing the roads of daemons that would simply respawn elsewhere. The eternal night presented too relentless an onslaught for mere humans to keep apace; without the reprieve of daylight, their efforts were akin to trying to scoop the waves that crashed upon the rocky shores of Caem back into the Cygillan by means of a drinking glass. But not all people who had survived even this far into the Night were hale fighters, and the weak relied on the strong to constantly battle the daemons away from their roads and settlements no matter how ultimately futile the struggle.

It was not sustainable forever. Something had to break.

Something was already close to breaking, what with Lucians and Niflheimians and Accordians alike all stuffed into the stifling city of Lestallum, and few of them as certain of the King of Light’s eventual return as Ignis was. Ten years of sharing walls and bread had done precious little to mend old animosities, and ever-worsening living conditions were fuel on an already volatile fire. The King’s return would be a breath of relief to some, a slight to others, and to most, a rallying point.

To Ignis, it was something else entirely.

The culmination of ten years of research, planning, scheming.

The impending performance of an enormous leap of faith, for both of them.

And something else still. Something tender and deeply vulnerable. Something that rang of childhood comforts and a radiant light in this increasingly dark world. 

_Noct was home._

Ignis touched the scar on his eyebrow, no longer half as tender after all this time as the memories behind them. A sacrifice attempted and denied, not by the gods but by Noct himself. The day that Noct had pleaded with the Crystal to spare Ignis’s life and walked forth to face his destiny alone was the last day that anyone had seen the prophesied savior of their world, and Ignis was determined not to let that prophecy play out as the gods intended.

The question was whether Noct himself would be amenable. 

Ignis gathered his belongings and made for the vehicle he had requisitioned for this particular excursion—a privilege in these resource-starved days, granted to him by his rank and status for official and military purposes. Still the daemons permitted no reprieve, and he disposed of six more before he was able to get back on the road and make his way to Hammerhead.

Bombs and ice grenades lined the roads like so many street lamps, providing a grotesque neon light show against the pitch blackness that was the vast wastelands of Lucis; luminous and psychedelic, wanton and offensively raucous, like hedonistic revelers in the throes of a never-ending celebration in mockery of mankind. His fingertips thrumming nervously against the steering wheel, Ignis was reminded of another such bacchanalia as the fluorescent beasts whipped by him on the otherwise empty highway.

Another lifetime ago, when their lives and their most pressing concerns were much different.

A fleeting indulgence that felt forbidden even to remember, even now.

An otherwise insignificant muggy summer night when they were each on opposing sides of the wise age of twenty, at an establishment in the Tonberry District known as the Firelight.

 _“You oughtn’t be here. I’m taking you home.” He snatched up Noct’s wrist and immediately began escorting him to the exit in a manner that might have rightfully seen him accused of being too_ familiar _with the Crown Prince._

_“Ugh! Ignis! It’s fine!” Noct jerked his wrist out of Ignis’s grasp with a petulant stomp—a childish response to an admittedly patronizing action that left Ignis with no choice but to halt and face him. “No one recognizes me here! It’s dark, everyone’s drunk, no one cares, it’s fine.”_

_“It isn’t fine, and Prompto should have known better! All it takes is one person, Noct—_ **_one_ ** _—to see you in a place like this, and it would be all over the—”_

_“Then stop calling me that! Six, Specs, I’m Cae here. Get it?”_

‘Cae’ wasn’t half as clever as he thought he was, of course. But there was a freedom to him in that place that Ignis had envied. What if they really could be anonymous, really could set aside their responsibilities and obligations for an evening and just...dance, like twenty-year-olds?

He had conceded to letting them have one more drink, one more dance. They had already purchased him one, and he knew it was a stall—Prompto was talking to someone attractive, and Ignis understood the underlying motives—but it was also a compromise. _One more drink, then we go._

It was more than a compromise. It was a taste. 

Not of the supposed joy of a thumping bass and candy-colored glowsticks, of course, but of the illusion they had crafted for themselves. It alarmed Ignis how willing he was to slip into it with them, particularly when he became very aware that the music they danced to had no discrete beginning or end to any given ‘song’ and therefore the counting of how much dancing constituted ‘one more dance’ fell upon Ignis, yet he quietly neglected the task. It was a fantasy in which none of them had any ties to the throne, in which none of them were under scrutiny save for if they happened to catch someone’s fancy from across the room. But that was a very different sort of gaze than the watchful eye of the Crownsguard.

Ignis quirked his eyebrow uncertainly at one such gaze in a moment of hesitation and minor panic barely a second before Noct tugged him onto the dance floor.

He swiftly learned the appeal of what he would have considered base entertainment and a questionable locale, and even the repetitive music became less offensive to his ears. In a place like that, no one cared how he danced or whom it was with. And Noct, he seemed so free of all his usual concerns, eyes closed and blue glowsticks waving around to no particular choreography. This, Ignis realized, was a part of Noct’s life he had never been admitted into; the metaphorical clubhouse door that had been swung firmly shut some years ago with a ‘No Advisors Allowed’ sign bolted onto it until Ignis had so rudely forced his entry this evening. He realized it was more out of necessity than friendship that they had granted him brief visitor privileges, but even still it had a certain allure.

Noct was inebriated enough that Ignis remained mindful of his responsibility to look after him, but not so far gone that Ignis estimated him to be in any imminent danger of anything more than an unpleasant hangover. He seemed relaxed, and happy, and Ignis was reluctant to take that away from him. But with relaxation came a disregard for usual boundaries, and that… well, Ignis was reluctant to take that away from himself. 

_He’s forgetting he’s with you,_ Ignis had to remind—convince?—himself when Noct began to dance closer, when their hands brushed together and Noct so comfortably occupied Ignis’s personal space as though it were second nature to stand and to move only inches away from Ignis’s body. As though they were lovers. As though they shared this sort of intense proximity all the time rather than it being—at most—a reminiscence of when they might have held hands and occupied one another’s space as children, before the world told them that was too familiar and wrong. Noct presently flirted with such proximity being neither of those things, and Ignis drank in the illusion even more easily than he did his vodka tonic.

It was all so tantalizing until it occurred to Ignis that if this was where Noct went in his drunken state, then it was probably because he danced like this with other people quite often. And that had the adverse effect of making Ignis feel miles away from him.

He was still miles away from him. Literal ones, now, and soon to be fewer.

Noct was home, and Ignis pressed his boot a little bit harder against the gas pedal. A red giant lifted its blazing cleaver and roared indignantly at him as he sped through the barren plains that would take him to Hammerhead, but even when it gave chase Ignis paid it no mind. This kingdom was soon to no longer be theirs.

And Ignis had a king to welcome.

* * *

The road from Galdin Quay to Hammerhead was much rougher than Noctis ever could have imagined. Sitting in the passenger seat of Talcott’s— _Talcott’s!_ —pick-up truck, the Chosen King had a front row seat to the end of the world.

It was grim. And a grimmer portent still for him personally.

Nothing lived in the long stretch between Galdin Quay and Longwythe, which was not to say that nothing _existed_ , because there was plenty existing out there that could not rightly be called ‘living.’ Even the grass had long since been starved of sustenance, but all manner of daemons roamed the ruins of human civilization in search of remaining prey. Noctis could see their glowing eyes and blazing flames dotting the hills for miles, vying against no other lights even where thriving settlements had been located. 

Save for that one glowing light against the inky black cloud cover to the west, visible even from here behind the Kettier mountain range. 

“ _Only_ Lestallum…?” 

“Everywhere else has been abandoned,” Talcott informed mournfully, “everyone run out of their homes by the daemons. Lestallum keeps high-powered lights running thanks to the Exineris, but it’s the only place that can.”

The sorrowful resignation in Talcott’s voice didn’t match even a fraction of the horror that Noctis felt as he let that sink in. Only one city left to the entirety of the Lucian population, the rest of the continent from Styrian to Cygillan lost to the daemons. How had people lived like this, and _were_ they still living? How long had it been this bad? How much longer could it go on? 

Was his own absence to blame?

They were irrelevant questions in the grand scheme of things. He had returned with one mission in mind, and while the circumstances were indeed more dire than he ever could have imagined, the scope of the problem didn’t affect his decision. 

He was here to save them. 

Whatever it took. 

And that cost, he knew, would be unbearably high—for him, and probably for his loved ones...but in the grand scheme of things…

“Well, Miss Cindy still keeps Hammerhead up and running,” Talcott continued, “which is where we’re headed now, though it’s more a slayer station than a garage these days. Iris and the guys have been fighting, too. The whole thing was Iris’s initiative, actually, back before she was even a member of the Crownsguard— Iris the Daemon Slayer, they call her now.”

Iris the Daemon Slayer. Crownsguard. ‘Miss’ Cindy running Hammerhead. “Huh…” Noct let his head wrap around all that for a moment before he started asking the indelicate questions. “Is—is Cid still around?”

“He’s...around, though he’s not doing too well these days. He’s pushing ninety, and medical resources aren’t what they used to be. Doctors say he’s lucky to have made it this long, but Cid says if the gods want him they’ll have to drag him to hell themselves.”

Noct chuckled under his breath and turned his head toward the window, trying to imagine Cid saying such a thing against the backdrop of this hellscape. “That sounds like Cid all right.”

The face he imagined should look older, he realized, and possibly more feeble. He tried to adjust for it in his mind, but he couldn’t imagine what _any_ of them looked like ten years older. He scarcely recognized the stretched, gaunt reflection gazing back at him from the curved pane of Talcott’s passenger side window, all scraggly hair and hollow eyes and unshaven cheeks. Noctis had never grown a beard in his life, partly because _someone_ had cautioned him that a prince ought to appear well-groomed every time he neglected to shave for a few days, and partly because he was afraid he couldn’t grow a full one and would just look like a pathetic little boy if he tried.

It grew in fuller than he’d imagined, and he had a dissonant appreciation for that. But he still missed the voice lecturing him in the back of his mind.

_“You’ve a spot on your collar. Here, let me—”_

_“Stop, it’s fine.”_

A pause. Noctis braced himself.

“...What about my...the gang?”

“Oh, they’re doing all right. They’re not exactly joined at the hip anymore because they all have different responsibilities now, but they’re each doing really well for themselves. Well, as well as anyone’s doing. Prompto just helped raise a whole fleet of chocobos, and Gladio’s Captain of the Crownsguard now.”

_“If you think Secretary Claustra won’t notice a spot on the collar of the—”_

_“I said it’s fine!”_

Noct bobbed his head, and a contingent of wooden cactuars on the dashboard in front of him mimicked the action. Prompto was dealing with chocobos...that was cool...Gladio in charge of the Crownsguard...sounded about right...

“And...Ignis?”

“Does a little bit of everything, really. Diplomacy, daemon slaying, research— chances are, if there’s something you need to know, Ignis knows it. Heck, he taught me almost everything _I_ know.”

Noct exhaled and watched the relief sweep over his own foreign features in the windshield. “...Me too.”

He could still recall the frustration and panic of that day, even in the morning before they knew what they _ought_ to have been panicking about. Gods, it all felt so stupid and selfish now...

It was his _hair_ of all things that broke the proverbial anak’s back. It was having one of those days in which it just _wouldn’t_ spike in any rational manner, and of course it had to be the day that he had so much riding on his appearance, and tensions were already high and his nerves were frayed about as thin as he could bear and underneath it all was the godsawful truth behind the bullshit veneer that _any_ of this was complicit. So when a lock of hair refused _for the fifth time_ to stay as he had arranged it, all of Noctis’s frustration bubbled to the surface like a pot of boiling water and overflowed in the form of a primal, unintelligible yell and a senseless act of aggression against his hair as he ruffled it furiously into the zu’s nest it insisted on being anyway. 

_Fuck this. Fuck all of this._

Noctis gripped the sides of the vanity dresser in his provided room and took deep, slow breaths, head bowed between his shoulders as he tried to get a more _kingly_ grip on himself.

Ignis was silent behind him for several tense and awkward seconds, and Noctis could practically feel the mental calculations he must have been going through to try to arrive at the correct reaction to this particular variety of badly behaved prince. “I know you never expected to have to conduct such meetings so soon—”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?” Ignis’s voice was so much softer than Noct expected, or felt he deserved when he was lashing out in childish frustration like this. The guilt for putting him in this situation took hold immediately. “How can I help?”

He turned his sulky, petulant ass around to face Ignis with a sigh; he owed him at least that much, but now he was left needing to actually articulate what had him so on edge and only felt embarrassed by how petty it all was. Talk about his feelings? Well, he had walked himself into this corner, he supposed, and while getting there hadn’t been the result of a dazzling display of kingly maturity, backing out wouldn’t have been the regal thing to do, either.

“I don’t know what happens next,” he admitted, leaning his back against the vanity but still studying Camelia Claustra’s ornate carpet in diligent evasion of Ignis’s eyes.

Ignis’s bafflement did not escape him regardless. “Well— None of us do.” Solid wooden legs scraped against the antique carpet as Ignis pulled the ottoman by the foot of the bed a few inches closer and perched himself upon it to settle firmly into Explaining Mode. “Ideally, once you obtain Leviathan’s blessing, we’ll be able to—”

“No, not that.”

“What, then?”

“Luna.”

“...Oh.”

Noctis sighed under the enormity of it all. It _shouldn’t_ have been the heaviest thing that weighed on him right now, and maybe on some level it was not, but it was the most pressing to him in this moment and maybe he needed it to be. Maybe he needed to think about it eventually.

They had been by to see the dress on display the afternoon prior, and Noctis didn’t know what he felt about it. It was a grotesque sort of memorial to a woman who was still alive, an opportunistic grab for a designer label to align its brand with a figure beloved by the people, the likes of which Noctis had been subjected to his entire life. But it didn’t feel connected to him at all, even though it should have. Even though it was supposed to be _his_ bride’s dress, _his_ cancelled wedding that they were all mourning. It just felt… 

Like he was desperately trying to feel how he was supposed to be feeling, but he couldn’t.

The guys had tried to rally his spirits by cheerfully suggesting that the wedding could still happen, misidentifying the source of Noctis’s discomfort. And why wouldn’t they? It wasn’t as though he ever talked about how he felt about it, which is precisely why it was all coming to the forefront at precisely the least opportune moment, ten minutes before he was supposed to meet with Secretary Camelia Claustra of Accordo as King Noctis of Lucis to discuss diplomatic matters that had nothing to do with his love life.

And yet.

“Do you think they’re right?” Noctis chewed on his lip, his brow set in consternation. “Should we still go through with the wedding?”

“That’s entirely up to you and Lady Lunafreya. If you’re both amenable, I see no reason not to follow through with the arrangement.”

“You’re my Advisor, Ignis; I need you to advise me.”

They looked at each other for some silent seconds, and Noctis could see the wheels turning in Ignis’s mind. Whatever was being spun there, Noctis needed it like air, but he waited, patiently, for Ignis to share it. 

“I think she would make an excellent queen,” he said at last. “Lucis would be hard pressed to do better.”

“But should I marry her?”

“There is no other way to make a queen, and whomever you marry will necessarily be the Queen of Lucis. It’s a hefty consideration to take into account, as is your own heart.”

“And how much weight am I supposed to give to each of those things? How much do I get to decide what I want, and how much do I have to prioritize _picking a queen_?”

“I can’t answer that for you.”

“Damn it, Ignis!”

It wasn’t until Noctis raised his voice that Ignis showed the barest hint of irritation. He adjusted his grip on the ottoman beneath him, shifted his posture and fixed Noctis with a particular rigidity in his brow that Noct knew to mean _‘I will be very patient with you, but don’t abuse my patience or I will begin to push back.’_

“Do you _want_ to marry her, Noct? Disregard marriage for the time being— do you want to _be_ with her?”

He had to look away. He couldn’t handle facing Ignis when he knew he was this wrong. “I don’t know.”

“And I certainly do not know for you. What I do know is that you will, eventually, be expected to marry _someone_ , and with the kingdom in the state that it is in, it would be unwise to delay the emergence of an heir for too long.”

 _An heir_. Gods, now they were talking about _babies_ , and Noct didn’t even know if he _liked_ anybody. He grimaced outright and began pacing the room. Did he like Luna? Did he ever like anyone? Well, sure he liked her as, like, a _person_ , as a _friend_ , but how did he know if he liked her as anything more than that? How did anyone know, ever?

Prompto got crushes. Gods, did Prompto get crushes. On girls, on guys— Noctis heard about a new one every two weeks, to the point where it amazed him how Prompto could still mean any of it seriously. But he could never relate, maybe because the very concept of Noctis himself dating carried so much baggage that he didn’t feel anything for anyone at all. Was that a thing that happened?

And Gladio, the consummate ladies’ man. Girls liked _him_ a whole lot, and there were a lot of life experiences Gladio got to enjoy thanks to his abundance of female attention that Noct couldn’t even fathom happening to him. He was discreet about most of it, always tasteful, always tactful, until every now and then he’d casually mention some threesome he’d been in, or his extensive familiarity with some crazy sex act that Noct didn’t think people actually did in real life, and you _remembered_ that Gladio was on a different level than most of mankind.

Even Ignis he knew could be a smooth motherfucker when he wanted to be. Ignis played _coy_ , Ignis _flirted_ , in a manner so subtle you didn’t know if he was just being very polite or imagining the person naked. But spending as much time together as they did, even Noctis caught him now and then in those _oh shit_ moments of _Ignis is actually flirting with that person_. It was such a rare occurrence that it never stopped being jarring and slightly uncomfortable, perhaps because Ignis was his last bastion in his friend group of people who were just as eternally single as he was. Hell, Noct didn’t even know which direction Ignis swung; he was never attached to anyone, and he never talked about it. Sometimes Noctis felt some guilt about that, because he probably took up too much of Ignis’s time himself for Ignis to get romantically involved with anyone. But at the same time, if Ignis ever ended up in a relationship, Noct didn’t know what he would do.

But as for Noct? It just seemed too risky to ever entertain any thoughts of anyone. He got a lot of attention because he was the prince, and he knew to be wary of that. He envied the freedom of his friends. But he couldn’t relate to them.

He didn’t know why. He felt broken. Just one more thing he was failing at as prince, and now as king. Because he was going to be expected to get married sooner than _any_ of them were, and all he could do with the very _thought_ of that was pace back and forth in the Accordian Consulate’s guest rooms on the verge of tears because _gods forbid_ he might actually be expected to kiss a girl and have a baby and the very thought of needing to take a prospective bride home after this—someone he liked and respected a whole lot, even!—was giving him a full blown panic attack.

“What if I marry her and she’s wrong for me?” he argued. “What if— I mean that’s not even the _point_ , right? Whoever I marry— it doesn’t even matter if they’re right for _me_ , as long as they’re right for Lucis.”

“Noct, I didn’t mean it that way—”

“No, but I did. Because that’s the way it is. I’m King now and nothing that I ever do is going to be for me anymore, it has to be for the kingdom.”

His hands were becoming clammy and there was a tremor to his voice that he was glad Ignis was the only one here to witness. (Small mercies.) Ignis stood and tried to calm him down, tried to put his hands on his shoulders. “Noct, if you don’t feel that way about Lady Lunafreya, you can find someone who’s right for you.”

He halted and spun on Ignis so fast that they nearly collided. “I’ll _never_ find someone who’s right for me, Ignis! That’s the _thing_!” Gods, why didn’t Ignis _get_ it?! Why couldn’t he understand this anxiety, this paradox, this— “I’ll never find someone who’s right for me because I don’t feel that way about anyone, and it doesn’t matter what I feel because I have to _pick_ someone, and whoever I pick I’m going to be committed to them for the rest of my life, and I’ll never be able to have those experiences of, like, being in love! Or—or just—knowing what it feels like to be kissed by someone who _actually loves me_ and isn’t just fucking _obligated_ to because I married them! Because **_I_ ** can’t have that!” Gods, his voice cracked, and Ignis was looking at him now like he had three heads, but once this bottle was open it was hard to screw the cap back on with everything spilling out. “Because I don’t—I’ll never—”

Ignis kissed him.

Holy shit. Ignis was kissing him.

Well, it might have been more accurate to say he mashed their lips together, as there was nothing soft and gentle about it like he imagined a proper kiss should be. But his lips were pressed firmly against Noct’s, and his fingers gripped tightly into his arms, and his eyes were squeezed shut and when he pulled away from him there was a definite puckering sound so yeah, Noctis concluded, that was definitely a very intentional kiss with Ignis just now and not just some crazy new method of shutting the prince up with his mouth.

But it did work.

Ignis’s eyes were wild behind his skewed glasses, giving him a slightly unhinged look as he maintained his grip firmly on Noctis’s shoulders and darted his eyes feverishly back and forth between Noct’s.

“I promise you have always, _always_ been loved, and _nothing_ will ever change that.”

The door opened and Noct nearly fell backwards with the velocity at which they broke apart. Gladio was standing there, door held wide with his hand on the knob, but by some bizarre miracle he was facing someone down the hall and completely oblivious to his two best friends frantically extracting themselves from exactly the sort of compromising position that Gladio would have loved more than anyone else in the world. “Yeah, just tell them we’ll be there in a sec. I’ll get them now.”

By the time Gladio actually turned his attention to the room he had entered, Noct’s face was so hot he was sweating and Ignis was meticulously examining the buttons on the cuff of his jacket. “You guys ready?” Noctis gathered he still didn’t look the picture of kingly composure and diplomatic readiness yet, and maybe Ignis wasn’t selling it either, because Gladio flickered his gaze from Noct to Ignis to Noct and followed up with, “Everything all right in here?”

“I just— I was feeling a little sick,” Noct lied; Gladio was too good at reading body language to pass it off as nothing at all. “Totally just vommed in the bathroom a little while ago. Specs was...helping me.”

Gladio looked him over and winced. “Well try not to barf on the Secretary, that wouldn’t be a good look for any of us.” He hesitated. “Do you want me to tell them to reschedule?”

“No, I— I’m pretty sure it’s all out now. I’m feeling much better. Just, ah… give me a minute to freshen up?”

Gladio made a vague noise of assent. “Get fresh, but try not to take too long doing it.”

He walked out and left the door ajar, but took off down the hall with the long, confident strides that said he was out of ear shot. Noctis turned immediately to Ignis in complete and utter bafflement, yet all he got in return was his offensively chiseled profile.

“I’ll let you freshen up alone.” Ignis was uncharacteristically quiet and staunchly avoided eye contact as he made for the door.

“Iggy—”

“You’ll be fine; splash some water on your face and put these matters out of your mind. I have every faith in you to perform well today, but you oughtn’t keep the Secretary waiting.”

“But you—”

Ignis closed his eyes, and Noctis told himself it didn’t hurt when he still wouldn’t turn to face him. “ _Please_ , Noct. I beg you, let me take my leave of you, if only this once.”

But how could he, when Ignis had just turned his world upside down?

They had been in each other’s lives every day since Noctis was _four_ , and somewhere along the way he had come to think of Ignis as less of a separate entity and more of an additional limb who told him how and when to do things. Not to say that he didn’t _respect_ Ignis as his own person, of course; if anything, he saw Ignis as someone far more refined than he was—smarter, cooler, _so_ much more capable—and while he knew their friendship was genuine, he couldn’t help but think that was more a matter of circumstance than choice if he ever thought about it at all. No, it was more that Ignis had been so omnipresent in his life that on some level he had absorbed him into his own identity: his older, wiser, better dressed, and possibly slightly gay right hand. 

Well, at the moment he was leaning more toward “probably definitely gay.”

But— Ignis and _him_? Was that, like, a thing that could happen? Was that a thing Noctis _wanted_ to happen? (Also breaking news to Noctis: Was _he_ into guys?? He was shockingly not put off by it, so current signs pointed to ‘well damn, maybe.’)

Even an answer to all of these questions wouldn’t have resolved the matter of Luna, though, and Ignis probably needed some space, so Noct conceded to give him that. There would be plenty of time later to sort out his personal life; right now, he just needed to get Leviathan’s blessing, and hopefully get Luna to safety with them, and they could figure out their next steps from there. And...whatever the hell had just happened.

So how cruel was it, then, that the next time he saw Ignis, he was lying on the ground of Zegnautus Keep with his life ebbing away? The Ring of the Lucii on his finger, his skin a web of charred ash, Noct’s name upon his lips like a plea, a prayer. His last rites before Bahamut claimed him into the Beyond.

Noct couldn’t let that happen. Not after what happened to Luna, not ever.

_Not Ignis._

So he went willingly. He was willing to do whatever it took, if it meant saving Ignis. Because he was more than his right hand, or an ear to unload his problems on, or a second brain to hold all the information Noct didn’t want to keep track of himself; he was, and always had been, a deeply intrinsic part of his heart. 

Ten years was an awful long time to wait, a long time to live and grow. A long time to expect someone’s feelings not to have changed while you were gone.

And the worst of it was that it didn’t even matter. Because Bahamut said he needed to die.

So here he was, like a fugitive coming to turn himself in and face justice, whatever justice there was in it all. He didn’t expect Ignis to still be in that place, emotionally, and Noct had no future here even if he was. He was a specter walking among the living with no time left to build new things; the last thing he wanted was to interject himself into any of their current lives and stir up old feelings just to soon be gone again. But these last few days were a goodbye, and maybe Ignis would still find some comfort in resolution. Maybe it would help put old ghosts to rest.

_I loved you too, Iggy. Thank you. For all you’ve ever done and ever been._

“We’re here, Your Majesty.” 

Noct didn’t need to be told when they rounded the last hill and the giant structure of the Hammerhead Garage came into view, but he appreciated the courtesy all the same. At the same time, ‘here’ was subjective; the structure looming ahead of them was unmistakably the Hammerhead Garage, flanked by Takka’s Pit Stop and the large metal signs that heralded travelers for a mile in either direction to the east and west. But everything was in disrepair, dilapidated far more than ten years should have done to it and coated in a pestilent black grime. Large flood lights swathed the area in harsh blue tones, nearly giving the impression of daylight, but not quite. 

Noctis recalled the first time they had come here, and how glad they had been to finally see that big sign roll into view. He couldn’t replicate that sense of relief now. 

He followed Talcott out of the truck and inside the restaurant, Umbra bounding out of the pickup bed and weaving excitedly around his legs as he neared the restaurant. He wasn’t sure what or who would be waiting for him inside, but he was sure that stepping through those doors was the beginning of the end and he couldn’t tell if that filled him with dread or relief. 

_It’s time to bring this story to a close._

He pulled the rusty door open and stepped inside.

“Noct!”

It was Prompto’s excited voice that greeted him first, and his BFF nearly leapt out of the seat in the corner booth where they were all congregating—discussing something, or waiting for him, he supposed. (Talcott had mentioned that his phone battery had died, and otherwise he would have called ahead to let them know precisely when they were arriving.)

The other two with Prompto wasted no time in standing to face their king properly, and Noct would have rolled his eyes at the formality of it all if he wasn’t so damned happy to see them alive and well. They were all wearing the formal military uniforms that resembled the garb of his father’s Kingsglaive, and Ignis and Gladio bowed in perfect, practiced unison: flourish of the right hand, fist over heart, quarter bend at the waist. Prompto lagged behind, but displayed the same courtesy, then unceremoniously barreled into him for a full-body hug.

“He-ey, I missed you too,” Noct teased with a nervous laugh, and he ruffled Prompto’s hair for lack of knowing how else to respond, having never been much of a hugger himself. (But if this wasn’t exactly the occasion that called for it, when the hell was?)

Prompto pulled away to wipe at some tears, and that was when Noct saw the latest of many unfortunate changes to have occurred in his absence. 

“What’s this all about?” He gestured incredulously at the scruff on Prompto’s chin.

“Oh, ah...hah.” Prompto thoughtfully rubbed the... _beard_ , if it could be called that. “I dunno, just trying something out, I guess. Do you like it?”

“I, uh.”

“It’s terrible,” Gladio supplied, and nudged Prompto aside to clap his big, meaty arms around Noct’s shoulders. Noct could swear he had gotten even bigger while he was gone, if that was possible, and had to make a conscious effort to suppress a strained wheeze when Gladio squeezed him. But he looked good. They all looked good. Tired, maybe. Older.

“Sure took your sweet time,” Gladio accused, but there was all fondness in his eyes when he stepped back.

“Not like I had a choice,” Noct coyly defended. But his attention had already drifted from Gladio, truth be told.

The injuries that had nearly claimed Ignis’s life that day still left scars on his face, dotting his eyebrows, his lips, and the bridge of his nose. But they didn’t dampen the smile he wore, the quiet and hopeful joy that radiated from his clear, green, notably unspectacled eyes despite his best efforts to contain his emotion with noble decorum and restraint.

Noctis stepped around Gladio and stopped just in front of Ignis, his chin poised high like he supposed a king’s should be. Like someone with regal poise might regard his faithful, to match Ignis’s display of courtly dignity. But all this playing at king and knight couldn’t steel the soft warmth of his smile or keep his eyes from stinging with the threat of tears.

_I leave this all to you, Ignis._

Ten years he had spent mulling it over. Ten years he had spent absorbing Bahamut’s wisdom, reflecting upon the Cosmogony and the state of the world. But there had been plenty of time to reflect upon his mortal life as well. Ignis had been in nearly all that he saw: every memory, every feeling, every idle thought. He could measure his own life by the progressions of Ignis’s hair styles; he could conjure the scent of him from memory; he knew his essence, his energy, the sounds of his breaths and the meanings of his silences. 

_All said and done, you might have been the love of my life._

“Ignis.”

Ignis parted his lips and took a hitched breath before he spoke, and Noctis wondered if he would have been as mindful of that action _before_. “Welcome back, Your Majesty.” He hesitated, then wrapped his arms around Noctis more fully than Gladio had but more gently than Prompto, and Noctis recalled that was the precise scent of his childhood memories and knew it would be the hardest part of his goodbyes. 

Ignis stepped back, but his hands lingered on Noctis’s elbows and his eyes burned with a fierce determination that claimed every remaining iota of Noct’s soul that was not already his. He could have said anything then, and his words, this moment—Ignis standing beside him again at last, his hands on his arms, his eyes locked onto his, and so, _so_ many things still unsaid—would have seared themselves into Noct’s memory forever. 

He was ready for any statement other than the one he got. 

“I have a strategy,” Ignis said. “And I think we can win.”


	2. Chapter 2

_I think we can win._

_Winning_ was a foreign concept to Noctis at this point, and Ignis’s declaration begged the question of whether they even shared the same concepts of victory and defeat. Did Ignis know what was at stake? Did he know the gods had already outlined a course of action? Would his thoroughly crafted strategy be rendered moot by Noct’s willingness to make the prescribed sacrifice? And if so, how could he let Ignis down?

He felt oddly like he was being called into the principal’s office when Ignis gently closed the door behind them to the small room that had once served as the back office of Takka’s Pit Stop, his long fingertips ghosting over the metal doorknob and his demeanor heavy with an unnamed weight. He otherwise still carried himself well, despite the general state of the world and everything Noctis imagined they must have been through during his absence, and part of him just wanted to yell how relieved he was, how sorry he was, and so many things besides that he couldn’t even name all the emotions that threatened to ravage his heart. He may have been here for one dire purpose and that one purpose only, but tied very close to that purpose was ensuring the particular safety of the three of them, and Noctis was too human not to feel on some level that the wellbeing of his own loved ones and the wellbeing of the entire rest of the world were of roughly equal importance.

It struck Noctis as a little strange that Ignis wanted to discuss this strategy without Prompto and Gladio; their lack of curiosity about it gave Noctis the impression that they had already been filled in on the details, so why exclude them from the briefing? Perhaps there was some other reason why Ignis wanted him alone, then, and that—

No, he was here for one purpose and one purpose only. And that purpose was to finish everything.

Noctis wet his lips and flexed his damp palms. “Listen, Ignis, I—”

Ignis halted and looked at him, patient and almost reverent, hanging on whatever words were about to come out of Noct’s mouth, but even Noctis himself did not know what they might have been. They died in his throat, stuck to his gullet, and the King of Light found himself unable to sustain eye contact with the brilliance of Ignis’s expectant jade eyes absent his glasses. Gods, when had they become so _vivid_? When had those fine lines formed around them, or his neck grown so thick or his frame so broad? Noctis swallowed and found reprieve in dropping his gaze to one of the drawers of a dented metal file cabinet in the corner, rusted and dusty and stuffed haphazardly with papers.

“I just, um… Thank you. For looking into it.”

“Of course.”

Ignis leaned against the file cabinet and folded his arms across his chest, the metal details of his uniform catching what paltry illumination was cast by a single, bare lightbulb overhead. Noctis alighted his own weight against the edge of what had once been Takka’s desk, now covered with piles of worn books and binders stacked seven high with just enough surface space remaining to take some of the pressure off his bad knee. The lightbulb flickered, and the sound of the electricity sputtering underscored how incredibly silent it was between the two of them.

But they looked at each other, furtively taking stock, assessing the damages. Each collecting his own thoughts, buying time as though they had a much healthier supply of it for sale.

“It’s weird seeing you without your specs, Specs.”

“Ah…” A gloved hand raised aimlessly to his face, found itself with no destination, and tucked under his opposite elbow once again. “I haven’t needed them, since Zegnautus Keep.”

“What, the crystal just...healed your astigmatism?”

“Crisp as an autumn day. A true blessing, considering the scarcity of optometrists in the apocalypse.”

“Think of all the nicknames you could have been spared if Dad had thought of that one like ten years earlier.”

“Keeping only one or two eyes on you wouldn’t have sufficed in some of those later years; you required at _least_ four.”

Ignis smirked, and Noctis grinned, and for a moment they forgot there was so much more hanging over them than a cracked ceiling and a struggling lightbulb. But only a moment.

“It’s good to have you back,” Ignis said quietly.

A chill ran through Noctis and his brief mirth fled with those half conjured bittersweet memories of their youth. In the present there was only this: a transient moment, imperfect but priceless, which would be followed by a limited number of other transient moments, each more and more precious in their paucity until there were no more moments. ‘Back’ was misleading, and Noct couldn’t bear to leave them again without managing their expectations. The hairs on his exposed skin stood as goosebumps pulled harshly against his flesh. It used to be much warmer in the desert.

“Ignis, there’s something you should know before you get too deep into this strategy. The Astrals… They have their own strategy, and it involves me giving—”

“I know.” 

The words were so quiet and so swiftly spoken that Noctis almost wasn’t sure he heard them.

“You… You already know?”

Ignis pushed his weight off the metal cabinet and paced what small walking space there was in the cramped office. “‘The King of Kings shall be granted the power to banish the darkness, but the blood price must be paid. To cast out the Usurper and usher in dawn’s light will cost the life of the Chosen.’ The full prophecy is quite clear about its expectations, carved into the walls of the Founder King’s tomb in Old Lucian. It’s a contract, signed with his actions and to be paid with your blood.”

He had been delivered the same terms by Bahamut, but to think that it had been written somewhere in the world he had lived in his entire life—somewhere he had _been_ , even—spelled out for far longer than he or anyone he had ever known had been alive... It only reminded him of the futility—the _stupidit_ y—of ever having thought they were fighting for something.

The truth tasted bitter on Noct’s tongue even now, but he swallowed it once again. It was a familiar pill, by now. “Kind of a shitty inheritance to leave your descendents.”

“Indeed.” Ignis paused directly in Noct’s gloomily vacant line of sight, prompting the redirection of his attention. “...But I may have found another way to clear your debt.”

Noctis blinked and looked up at Ignis, who was gazing meaningfully back at him.

“You mean, without—”

Ignis nodded.

Did he dare hope? Noctis trusted Ignis—he truly did. Implicitly, and arguably more than was even prudent, but in their sixteen—twenty-six?—year history Ignis had never once let him down. He had the kind of faith in Ignis that the left foot has for the right when running. He had the kind of faith that didn’t even spare a sensible thought to the inherent risks of giving him the keys to his apartment or the password to his bank account. He once jumped out of a fifth story window on Ignis’s instructions with no time to ask questions—and was caught before making it halfway to the ground. 

He wanted to trust Ignis now, too, and certainly Ignis would not _lie_ about such a thing… but even Ignis was human and susceptible to error. (No matter how much it felt to the contrary, at times.)

Noctis and his thundering heart decided upon cautious optimism, and he tried to steady his breaths while gazing up at his aspiring savior, eyes wide and heart in his hands. “Well, what is it?”

When Ignis did not immediately begin detailing his plan, Noct raised his eyebrows questioningly. 

“It entails an exceedingly high risk,” Ignis explained. 

“It wouldn’t be an Iggy plan if it didn’t. I’m willing to do whatever it takes, Specs. Specless.”

Ignis nodded with far more sobriety than that outstanding wordplay called for, his eyes locked onto Noct’s with a fierceness and determination that made Noct’s heart skip a beat. “As am I,” he assured quietly. 

While Noctis puzzled briefly over that, Ignis took a deep breath and assembled his thoughts. He made to pace again, but there wasn’t enough walking space to afford him more than maybe two steps in either direction. “There have been...certain things that have come to light while you were gone. About me. About the prophecy.”

Whatever optimism Noctis had permitted himself sunk in his chest and dipped its toes into an inky black pool of dread. “About...you _and_ the prophecy? Or about you and the prophecy separately?”

“Both, really.”

Of all the things that Noctis didn’t want in this world—Ardyn on the throne, the annihilation of the human race, herpes, beet salad—Ignis being involved with the prophecy that was about to claim his life was perhaps at the very top of that list. He wasn’t sure which scenario therein was more horrifying: the notion that Ignis might have something to do with the execution of the prophecy, or the thought of Ignis becoming another victim of it.

Noctis swallowed. “Where do you fit into it? ...Iggy?”

Ignis turned toward Noctis again, clearly anxious for more space to stretch his legs. He always had been prone to pacing when laying out plans or collecting his thoughts. Or when managing stress. “The curse of the Lucis Caelum bloodline began upon the founding of Lucis, when Somnus Lucis Caelum acquired the throne through the murder of his brother...Ardyn Lucis Caelum.”

“Yeah.” Noct nodded sagely, patiently. “Bahamut told me everything when I was in Reflection.”

“Did he also tell you that Ardyn was betrothed to the First Oracle?”

—Ardyn what now? Bahamut definitively had _not_ , and Noctis quickly shifted his eyes toward a spidery crack on the wall as he wondered what _else_ Bahamut had omitted, and why he had spent ten damn years in _Reflection_ —supposedly gaining all of the Astrals’ wisdom—if his Advisor was learning so much more on Eos in the meanwhile. “...He left that part out.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Ignis nodded. “Somnus murdered her when he murdered Ardyn. Or possibly just before he murdered Ardyn. It could have something to do with their feud— the order of events is unclear. These accounts were scribed by a Shivan priestess by the name of Ratia, as told to her by a soldier in Somnus’s army, and then confined to obscurity for their defamatory content.”

Noct furrowed his brow. The tale of the founding of their kingdom and the deeds of the Founder King—the versions free of murder and fratricide, that is—were well known Lucian history that even common children could recite by elementary school. But Noctis, being who he was, had a very personal relationship with the ripples of that particular note in history that made it difficult to chalk the whole thing up to grand government conspiracy. “But what about all the history about the Founder King and the First Oracle working side by side? What about the whole alliance between the houses of Caelum and Fleuret? How could any of that have happened if Somnus _killed_ her?”

“It did happen,” Ignis confirmed, “but not with the First Oracle, Aera Mils Fleuret; rather, it was the second, her daughter Sela. Since Aera was unmarried, Sela’s birth was quite scandalous, so the infant was secreted away to the temple where Ratia served, and it was not until she began to present her powers in the wake of her mother’s death that her true identity was acknowledged. Ratia’s account refers to her as ‘Sela Izunia Fleuret,’ and it seems the people knew her by that name as well. But as it was considered _indelicate_ to call attention to the Oracle’s bastardry, she became referred to as simply ‘the Oracle’ in all other records, and Aera and Sela became combined historical figures in the resulting confusion.”

Noctis drummed his fingers against the edge of the desk as his brain raced through all of this information. “Ardyn had a daughter,” he breathed.

“Yes.”

“...who begat the entire line of oracles.”

“Yes.”

“Including Luna.”

“...yes. And—well—not only Luna, we have reason to believe.”

Noct looked at Ignis patiently and quirked an eyebrow, waiting for whatever more there was to all of this, but all he could think was, _Did he know? Did he know when he stabbed her? When she gasped in pain, when her life slipped away, what did he see in her eyes? Was it his own blood?_ Noctis still saw the agony on Luna’s face as the dagger pierced her organs on the altar even now. Did he? 

Fifty miles from here, sitting on Noctis’s throne. Did he remember her?

Ignis took a deep breath and proceeded so cautiously Noctis had to wonder how much desire for murder his own face broadcasted right now. “It is...difficult to trace any ancestry with certainty where bastardry and extramarital affairs are concerned. Noble and royal houses such as ours pride ourselves on supposedly being able to trace our lineage back to the founding of Lucis or earlier, but truly, we only know that which is documented, and we are at the mercy of truthful accounting. Even Ravus knew nothing of the real Aera Mils Fleuret, or that his line was descended from Ardyn.”

“Well, of course. Ravus.”

“Not only Ravus.”

The staccato of Noctis’s fingertips against the desk intensified. “What are you getting at, Iggy?”

Ignis ran a gloved hand through his slicked back hair, tucking an errant lock back into place behind his ear. “Early on in the Fleuret family tree, there was a rakish young lad by the name of Marisius Mare Fleuret, elder brother to the Oracle Lucina Mare Fleuret. He was, in fact, the first Fleuret male firstborn, a line that had been blessed with many daughters for several generations. His male birth meant he was passed over in the line of succession for his next eldest sister, and in lieu of inheritance, he became something of an adventurer and a Casanova. Several of his exploits were documented in great detail, as well as his most prominent affair with a woman by the name of Violetta, who was often described in these accounts as his great lady love. She brazenly accompanied him on some travels despite that she was betrothed to another, and then she returned and followed through with the marriage, much to the dismay of polite society and her weak-willed husband...Lord Abernay Scientia.”

Noctis blinked as the real point of what Ignis had been trying to tell him for the past ten minutes hit him like a truck.

“Their first child arrived _improbably_ quickly and was documented as premature. They named him Valentius to celebrate the miracle of his extremely robust survival.”

“Where did you learn all this?”

“From the, ah—the ruins of Fenestala Manor.” 

Noct’s heart sunk, and Ignis cleared his throat. 

“After you left, the Empire burned it to the ground in retaliation against Ravus for defecting, but a member of his household staff—an avid bibliophile—rescued some very ancient books from the library. She said they contained all of House Fleuret’s noble history, and were therefore too important to let burn. However, in addition to being stashed away in a large library for decades, they were handwritten in Old Tenebraen, so their more shocking details had been lost to time.” Ignis raised his eyebrows helplessly and cast a weary frown toward nothing in particular as he tucked his arms across his chest again. “Unsurprisingly, my own ancestors told a different version of events. Truth, wisdom, and knowledge, you see.”

They were the tenets of House Scientia, and Noctis supposed the cynism directed toward them by its last son was not entirely uncalled for. Perhaps it was even the duty of last sons. “...So you think you’re descended from Ardyn.”

Ignis stopped in front of Noct and leaned in just slightly, almost as though he were afraid of speaking the words at a conversational volume. It was not overly close, but Noct’s heart skipped a beat all the same. “Not simply _descended_ from,” Ignis amended, and the fire in his eyes flickered with a hint of apprehension. “I think I may be his _heir_.”

_His heir._

For all the times Noctis had heard the word throughout his lifetime, for all the times he had ever wanted to rage at it, to run from it, and only recently to embrace it, it had never chilled him quite like it did right now. _Heir_. What did that mean, exactly? What did Ignis stand to inherit? A throne, like Noctis? A blood debt, like Noctis?

What was an heir, in the end?

Of course, Ignis was the heir of House Scientia, and along with that came a very large house in the upper hills of Insomnia that was probably in ruins and a household staff who were probably all dead. It came with the title of Lord, if anyone cared enough to call him that. It had afforded him certain privileges in life over his commonborn age peers, like the opportunity to become lifelong Advisor to the Crown Prince. 

It meant he was the firstborn son of the firstborn son of every Lord of House Scientia before him, and that included—ostensibly—whomever Lord Abernay Scientia and his dubious progeny Valentius had been. (And, admittedly, King Noctis CXIV did not know by heart the full two-thousand year lineage of all his noble houses, including the ones that had spawned his closest friends.) But as Ignis had already demonstrated, there was quite possibly a difference between being a son on paper and a son by blood. One secured a person property and titles. What did the other get him, and who was doing the accounting? Why was the difference so important? Why did gender matter at all?

There were a lot of questions. Noctis had spent his entire life puzzling over it. He still didn’t know the answers. 

What he did know were chilling words delivered to him by Bahamut, and as much as it made his blood run cold to think that Ignis— _his_ Ignis, for no matter how tragically he had failed to act to make him anything more in life, he did feel he was irrevocably _his_ —could be so closely entwined with his enemy, he knew in his heart that Ignis was right. 

_Whereupon brother hath slain brother in competition for divine power, a balance must be restored. The blood of one rules and the blood of one serves, but blood must be paid all the same._

Noct swallowed uncomfortably. “That’s… That seems like a leap, Specs. Why would you be so sure?”

Ignis unfolded his arms and tugged at the fingers of his left glove until the garment slipped off, then splayed his bare hand for Noct’s view. Like the scars on his face, some damage remained from the day they had last seen each other, and recalling that moment brought with it the sight of Ignis’s flesh as ashen as a corpse, his veins turned black, his skin turned white, and the Ring of the Lucii perched upon his finger ready to eat away at his remains until there was nothing left. He could hear his whimpers of pain, his strained breaths. He recalled the glisten of tears in Ignis’s eyes, and his own desperation, and what his name sounded like on Ignis’s dying lips.

Noctis’s heart raced uncomfortably with the memory, and in reliving that horror of the past he was all the more relieved that Ignis had made such a thorough recovery. His hand retained a normal color, save for some rippling scar tissue that was darkest around the base of his middle finger. The shape of the ring was still burned into him— not in any great detail, Crystal have mercy, but it was evident enough that this injury had been caused by something wrapped around his finger and searing his flesh.

“When I placed that ring upon my finger in Zegnautus Keep, before I faced Ardyn, I faced the Lucii. I pleaded for the power to defeat him and spare your life, but they said only the Chosen King could defeat—in their words—‘ _your_ progenitor.’” He dropped his hand with a sigh. “I thought they had meant ‘you’ in the plural, as in the progenitor of all of Lucis, which struck me as very curious since Ardyn had already specified to me that he was _not_ the true Founder King. Nevertheless, in the beginning I still sought the answers to this question along those lines: that Ardyn, somehow, by some twist of semantics and historical mistruths, was in fact the progenitor of Lucis itself. That was how I learned they had been meant to rule together, that Somnus’s murder of Ardyn was what had created the blood debt, and that discovery felt like a breakthrough. It wasn’t until I stumbled upon the tale of Marisius and Violetta that I realized the Lucii had been quite plain in what they had said, and they meant that Ardyn was _my_ progenitor in the singular.”

He was pacing again, but turned back to Noctis now and shook his head. “You know I am not one to place stock in superstition, but the coincidences seem too great. For me to have been placed in your life as I was, for the Lucii to permit me to wield the ring without claiming my life before you arrived. For you to have arrived precisely when you did, and for the crystal to have granted you the ability to heal my fatal injuries. These are remarkable exceptions to ancient rules, but the prophecy outlines an answer, I think, to the questions they beg: ‘Swordsworn at his side, the King of Light shall face the darkness.’ That could just as likely describe the three of us accompanying you as far as we have. But the ancient word for ‘swordsworn’ is another that can be either plural or singular. And it can also mean ‘brother.’”

This array of new information swirled in Noctis’s head until he felt like he was on a merry-go-round, spinning round and round and trying to make sense of the sky whirling above him. That must have been some actual memory he had once, because he could picture it so vividly: Ignis somewhere nearby, reciting lessons or a children’s poem or something—just talking, it didn’t matter. Ignis had always liked talking for the sake of it, reciting the things he knew, sometimes in hopes of Noctis learning some of it and sometimes just to display that he knew things. Noctis didn’t mind; his voice had become comforting, a constant. Like the assurance that he would be there to balance the other side of the see-saw, catch him at the end of the slide. A lifetime of answers and reassurances and unsolicited wisdom in the familiar cadence of Ignis’s voice.

“But we’re not brothers,” Noctis hastily pointed out, then winced when the coldness of it fell upon his own ears. “I mean, not by blood. Or marriage.”

“No,” Ignis conceded, “but Ardyn and Somnus were. And if you are being made to stand in for Somnus because you are his heir, then perhaps Ardyn’s heir might stand in for him as well.”

“To do what exactly…?”

Ignis took a deep breath and cast his eyes downward toward the glove still in his hand. He made to put it back on, then changed his mind and removed the other instead. “The reason why the Astrals want your life as payment for Somnus’s reign is because it was never meant to be his alone; it was to be shared with his brother. In murdering Ardyn in jealousy and greed, he stole from the gods, and while they were forced to bestow their power anyhow lest the Starscourge never be purged from the skies, they expect what was stolen to be returned to them.”

He folded both gloves together and tucked them neatly into his breast pocket before fixing his eyes bravely upon Noctis and continuing in soft tones. “But there is a way to cancel that debt rather than repay it… If instead of shedding blood _against_ one another for power, the brothers used that power to shed their own blood _for_ one another, it would nullify the curse, and a blood price would no longer need to be levied for it.”

Noct felt the intense chokehold of alarm crawl up his spine as he considered all the possible implications of Ignis’s words. “Why do I feel like whatever you’re planning to do will be horrifying?”

Ignis took both of Noctis’s hands and squeezed them, emerald eyes containing all the determination and devotion of a congregant locked with his own. “I will go with you,” he said, his voice low but steady, “until the end.”

Noctis was so startled by Ignis holding his hands that it was a moment before his meaning clicked, and the icy deluge of dread quickly numbed him to all other sensation. “No. Iggy—”

“I will be at the throne with you, I will make the sacrifice alongside you.”

“You _can’t_.” His voice cracked in the most pathetic way, and to Noctis’s chagrin he felt the hot threat of tears envelop his eyes. He tried to pull his hands away, but Ignis only held them tighter.

“ _Noct_ , it’s the only way.” Were the circumstances any different, Noctis might have taken offense to Ignis not letting him have his hands back, but the fearful desperation on Ignis was palpable. His pupils were large as they darted frantically between Noct’s, he swallowed in vain against his dry throat, and his palms, pressed white knuckles to white knuckles around Noct’s hands as they were—Did he realize how tightly he was holding him?—were clammy in their frantic vice grip.

He was terrified.

Not for his own life, Noctis realized. For Noct’s.

He had never seen Ignis so terrified.

“If the Astrals must claim _your_ life,” he entreated, low and shaky and _oh gods_ it sounded like he was fighting back tears himself, “if they will accept no substitute because of who you are, because of the name and family and role you were born to, I am powerless to stop that, but if there is even a _chance_ that I could save you by not leaving your side, then I vow on my very _soul_ you _won’t_ be going alone.”

Unable to bear seeing Ignis in this state any longer, Noctis pulled his hands away and twisted out of the space between Ignis and the desk; he _had_ to look away. “It’s _not_ the only way. We already know a guaranteed way and I’ve accepted it!”

“I _haven’t_!”

Ignis had whirled on him with the exclamation, but by the time Noct turned to see him again, he quickly turned away and was now pacing the other side of the cramped space in this dimly lit room with one hand on his hip and the other over his eyes. “You are everything to me,” he whispered on the other side of the tiny office, closed eyelids cradled in his palm. Then he sighed, dropped his hand, and continued with a little more presence and composure. “I don’t say this to guilt you; that wouldn’t be right— though I do perhaps wish you to empathize with why I cannot simply send you off to your grave.” He faced Noctis once again, and his eyes caught the overhead light in just such a way that Noct noticed how glassy they were. “But more importantly, I beg you to value your own life beyond what it might serve as a sacrifice. There is so much _more_ you still have to offer this world than your death, not only to me in my biased selfishness but to everyone, to the kingdom, to the world. Your survival could be _everything_ to many, _many_ people. _Please_ don’t throw it away when there could be even a _chance_ that you might live.”

“And you think you mean nothing to me?!” Noctis cried. Ignis might have been interested in maintaining some semblance of his composure, but Noct was well beyond that point. A frustrated, distressed sound left his throat that he didn’t care to identify and now he, too, was pacing— too antsy to stand still when he wanted to scream, when he wanted to cry, when he wanted to grab Ignis and shake him and tell him how stupid he was for thinking this was an option, how much he _needed_ him to survive after he _didn’t_ , how _godsdamned much he loved him—_ “Who was there for every nightmare I ever had when I was a kid? Who was there when school was a mess, or when I was freaking out about something in the middle of the night, or I mean, I don’t know, when I was just fucking _bored_ and needed someone to talk to? Not dad— he had a kingdom to run. Prompto? Sometimes, when we were older. But you—always you—it was _always_ you—since the _beginning_ — I don’t even remember _meeting_ you! I mean, kind of, because you and dad talked about it, but I don’t even know if what I remember is my own memory or just the _story_ of when we met. I don’t remember life before you; I can’t imagine what life would have been without you. I can’t be responsible for _ending_ your life!”

“I’m not _asking_ you to end my life; I’m asking you to grant me the permission to take the risks that _I_ choose to take.”

“No. No. Easy: _no_. Done.” He clapped his hands together, sliding one palm off the other. “I’m the king; I forbid it. Next royal request.”

“ _Noct._ ”

“ _Ignis._ ”

“You’re overlooking the most damning supporting evidence of all: I was able to access the Power of Kings once before and survive.”

“Barely!”

“I was able to—”

“When I saw you on the ground that day, crumbling into ashes, the ring on your hand— _my_ godsdamned ring on your hand—that was the worst thing that ever happened to me. That was _worse_ than my father dying—it felt worse than the whole _city_ falling, as awful as that is—and Luna—”

“Then _should_ I not make it you’ll be dead either way, and rather spared from the pain of losing me. _I_ won’t be.”

“You think I want to go to my death with that on my conscience?! On top of everything else?!”

“What I think is that hedging bets against nonexistence—”

“This isn’t something you should be gambling with!”

“—is an admittedly morbid but cosmically foolproof plan.”

“This is your _life_! _Your_ life! Gods, I would risk—” 

“If I am wrong about this, if my plan falls apart and I die, then I accept that—”

“—everything I have for this— _anything!_ —but I _won’t_ risk—”

“—What I _don’t_ accept is living the rest of my life without—”

“ ** _—you._ **”

The shouting match culminated in both men landing on the same word at the same time, then abruptly dissipated into naught but a lingering ringing in their ears.

Effectively startled to silence, Noctis swallowed against the lump in his throat and blinked away the tears pooling in his eyes. “Iggy,” he breathed.

Ignis sighed and paced away, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I am not suicidal,” he clarified, his words soft but steady in the lingering quietude. “I assure you, I am not trying to end my life. Nor would I, even if you died and I remained. But if I did not do all that it took to prevent that from happening, even if it means putting my own life on the line, I would never be able to forgive myself for my complacency, and that’s a far worse fate than dying in attempt to save the world and someone I love.”

Noct took a breath so ragged it shook him to the core.

“You ask me to make a very different sacrifice than the one I propose,” Ignis continued. “You ask me to bear the loss of you. And I appreciate the sentiment of you wishing to give your life for us, more than you could ever know. But you make the error of believing that grieving you would be a lighter burden to bear than death, that you are sparing me from something rather than asking the unimaginable. If you insist upon it, I will endure that, and I will carry your memory with me always, but know that you would be condemning me to something far worse than the end of my existence.”

When Noctis still didn’t speak, Ignis stepped closer, and Noctis looked up at him in the dim light. He knew his face was red and his eyes were wet but he half hoped that Ignis couldn’t discern that and half didn’t care. “But it’s _you_ ,” he breathed. 

“It is me,” Ignis agreed, “and I appreciate that you do not want to see an ill fate befall me, and how hypocritical it is for me to ask of you what I don’t want to accept myself. But _as_ the Chosen King, surely you must realize that your continued presence on Eos has more _objective_ value to the rest of the human race than mine does.”

Noctis turned his face away with a tight grimace, because _gods_ did he hate to admit that. And who _were_ the gods to decide that he was more important than Ignis? Surely if they were so damn powerful and all-knowing they could see that it had always been Ignis who helped him keep his head on straight? That their supposed Chosen One probably never would have fed himself more than a Hot Pocket and a bag of Doritos without his taller half?

He was discrediting himself a _little_. In the last year of his life especially, he had learned how to get tough when the tough gets going, or something to that effect. He had learned there were so many people beyond the walls of Insomnia with troubles he had never known about, never would have considered _before_. He had learned how to make difficult decisions. But not like this.

_A king pushes forward always, accepting the consequences and never looking back._

They were his father’s words, but Ignis was fond of reminding him now and again. Often when he needed to remind Noct of his duty, or of his faith in him.

Ignis took his hands again, gently this time, and sank to his knees at Noctis’s feet. His glassy eyes shone up at him in supplication, in deference, as the familiar skull pendant he wore glinted in the light at his throat. A token of his fealty to Noct, gifted to him upon his Crownsguard induction four—no, fourteen—years ago.

“Please, Noct…” Ignis’s voice was quiet and unnervingly unsteady in the small room. “I am begging you, as my king, as my liege, as my savior: Permit me to put my own life on the line for my country and king, as I swore I would when I took my vows.” 

Noct looked down upon Ignis, at his cheekbones, at his beauty marks, at his scars, at his greasy, unwashed hair until it all blurred together through the tears in his eyes and Noct blinked them away. His voice sounded so fragile to his own ears when he whispered, “How can you ask that of me?”

“You wish to make a sacrifice. I ask only that you make the more effective one.”

Noct swallowed, looking from each of Ignis’s eyes to the other, and all he could think was, _Please gods don’t let this be the end of our time together_. “...How sure are you of this plan?”

“I would stake my life on it.”

_His life._

Everything that Noct had been holding onto since they entered this room, everything that he had been trying to keep together came crashing down. His head bobbed, and an anguished sound caught somewhere between a cry and some wordless noise of consent struggled free from his throat, and along with it all the tears he had been holding back broke free and ran down his face. Whatever sense of self-consciousness or self-preservation had held them in check was destroyed by the thought of seeing Ignis go to his death. Now it was his turn to squeeze Ignis’s hands too tightly, sobbing in the dark with his eyes closed. 

Astrals, being king sucked.

Ignis stood and wrested his hands free to fully wrap his arms around Noct. Noctis sank against his neck, sank into the strength and the warmth of him, and muffled his sobs against the unforgiving material of the godsdamned military uniform that marked Ignis’s life as one in service to him, and to Lucis.

His Royal Majesty and the Lord of House Scientia clutched each other like that for untold minutes in comfort, grief, and desperation until the sobs that wracked Noct’s body subsided and he was able to regain his composure. When they left this room, he would need to look like a king again. 

They said nothing more about it; there was nothing more to say. But they looked at each other, and Ignis wiped the remaining tears from Noct’s eyelids with the pads of his thumbs, and he studied him for a moment and nodded.

“I’ll make the arrangements for Insomnia.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big shoutout here to [A Retainer's Resolve by stopmopingstarthoping](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19848877), which inspired the main scene of this chapter and consequently the whole fanfic.


	3. Chapter 3

The journey from Hammerhead to Insomnia was familiar to Ignis by now. They had first breached the Crown City seven years ago, when the fortification of Lestallum was still a work in progress and humanity’s grasp on its _humanity_ was tenuous at best.

Grand scale catastrophe brought out the best and the worst in people. Some had banded together and offered the compassion in their hearts to complete strangers; others brought the monsters inside the walls. Rapes, murders, and hate crimes had soared amidst the initial chaos of the everlasting night even as neighbors shared bread with neighbors and physicians worked around the clock with no promise of compensation. In a matter of months the monarchy had become all but a memory, a folk tale of a mythological figure who was to return and save them all, and Noct’s tenuous and theoretical reign preserved by little more than the remaining Crownsguard’s tireless efforts to maintain His Majesty’s role amongst his people in his absence. The first year of night—the first year without Noctis (and how ironic that was for a lover of linguistics and semantics)—had been the greatest challenge of Ignis’s life.

Given the near collapse of their very society, it was another two years before they had a militia coordinated enough to press an offensive against the walls of the Crown City. Even then, they had only regained a portion of the underground, to which Ignis, as the highest ranking Lucian official in the King’s absence, had made many journeys since. And things had gotten better, over time.

But watching Noct’s expression as they crossed the Cavaugh Bridge now, seeing the silent torrent of emotions play out in his eyes as they traveled farther and farther beyond the once barricaded checkpoint, he could remember that acute sense of excitement, anxiety, and bereavement all mixed into one stomach-churning cocktail as though it was his own first time. Insomnia was their home, and for better or worse would be their home until their last breaths; to return to it at last only to be welcomed by the ravaged husk of civilization it was now was like reuniting with a loved one only in their casket.

Ignis took advantage of the distraction and quietly studied Noct’s profile while he was preoccupied with the scenery. How strange that he had aged during that time, but how handsome he had become for it. Noct had always had such a boyish look about him, with large eyes, soft cheeks, and a shy smile, desperate to be seen as cool and mature but unable to shed the baby fat from his face or grow a beard even at the age of twenty. He had achieved both in the ten years since, but had lost an entire era of his life for it. His hair silvered prematurely at the temples, his gaze held the wisdom and solemnity of years he shouldn’t have logically experienced, and he looked haggard, like he had gone weeks without sufficient sleep. The Cosmogony spoke poetically of the Crystal as a womb; Divine Providence as the sustenance passed from mother to child; the King of Light nurtured with Bahamut’s holy wisdom and born anew to strike down the darkness by the grace of the gods— but they had always thought that to all be fairly _metaphorical_ until the day they watched Noctis walk directly _into_ the crystal with their own eyes. Whatever he had truly endured for all that time, it wove a mysterious tapestry into his countenance and Ignis yearned to pick at the threads and unravel it, but stayed himself.

Noct’s lips parted as they neared the end of the long bridge and the city ruins crept into view. Though only one building in the city retained electrical power, the shadowy husks of architecture that composed the skyline of Insomnia were bathed in the eerie glow cast by it long before the Citadel itself was in view. The sky above was concealed by the same impenetrable black clouds that blanketed the rest of Eos, capturing and diffusing the only lights left on in their city so that the gargantuan tombs of civilization below were demarcated against the inky backdrop by naught but faint haloes. The kingdom of Lucis had always had an almost comically steadfast obsession with the aesthetic of black on black; Ignis’s childhood in the Citadel had played out upon a stage of ornate black tapestries against rich black marble flanked by ebony, obsidian, and skulls. But to gaze upon its ultimate fate in the endless night, one could not help but wonder if its historical color palette had been a matter of irony, or of precognition.

He leaned toward Noct, voice pitched low in respect for the dead. “The Citadel’s lights remain on at all times. Presumably he’s replacing spent lightbulbs to keep it that way, though we’re unaware why.”

Noct looked at him blankly for a moment. “Ardyn?”

Ignis nodded. 

Noct continued gazing upon the macabre surroundings that passed them with that new puzzle adding a crease to his brow, and Ignis shifted in his seat at a loss for whether he should attempt to distract Noct from his somber thoughts or leave him to it.

He was wedged shoulder to shoulder between Noct and Talcott in the cabin of Talcott’s pickup truck. It was the Crownsguard’s pickup truck in truth, but as it had become largely Talcott’s duty to see to the ferrying and escort of key individuals and supplies, it was his in all but title and registration. Gladio and Prompto rode in the bed along with several crates of supplies en route from Lestallum to Insomnia, Shield and soldier ready to jump out and tend to any threats at a moment’s notice whilst His Majesty conferred with his Advisor within.

Would that it were going as it ought to have been.

Ignis cleared his throat and gently tried again. “Iris and Cor will be delighted to see you. Iris in particular has become a fine warrior, and Cor a fine military leader. Under his command, both Crownsguard and Kingsglaive have worked together in united purpose, with Gladio now serving as Captain of the Crownsguard, and the Kingsglaive under the command of Captain Libertus Ostium, a siege hero. Iris has single-handedly disposed of so many of the Scourge she is now known as the ‘Daemon Slayer.’”

Noct remained quiet, and for a beat Ignis worried that he hadn’t even listened to him at all. “Sure hope I don’t have to let them down,” he murmured toward the window on his opposite side, and the words cut directly through Ignis’s heart.

...Would they did not have quite so much to contend with.

For ten years, Ignis had dreamed of this day with equal measures longing and dread. He had never fancied it would be a particularly _joyful_ reunion, but some part of him had hoped that what might be their precious last remaining time together might be spent...connecting, somehow.

Back in Hammerhead, in the dusty storage closet that had once been Takka’s office, he had been indulgently relieved to discover that their relationship hadn’t suffered terribly for the years apart or for his youthful indiscretions. Noct still trusted him, still sought him for guidance and comfort, and those small treasures were far more precious to Ignis than his dignity or fulfillment of his own desires. He remained honest and clear about how he felt about Noct, yes, but that did not mean he required or expected any sort of romantic reciprocation. (Perhaps he ought to make that clear as well…)

There was also the matter that he had no reason to believe Noct had any romantic interest in men, without supposing that any man who tolerates queerness in other men must himself be queer (a destructive notion which Ignis refused to perpetuate). Noct had professed that he cared deeply about Ignis, yes, but a strong platonic affection was expected of two who had shared such closeness in childhood. It was Ignis’s eternal dilemma that his feelings for his oldest—and presumably heterosexual—friend had breached the platonic long ago, and so he had spent the majority of his life struggling to delineate to his wayward heart what he and Noct were and were not to be.

It was a struggle that he conquered with grace and aplomb ninety-nine percent of the time.

And the other one percent, well.

Prompto had informed him the proper term was ‘disaster gay.’

Ignis had staunchly corrected Prompto. He was a disaster _bisexual_.

Nevertheless, in all his years of knowing Noct (and with a fair amount of hypervigilance trained upon the matter) he had never known him to have any male crushes, a lingering eye for the male form, or to identify as queer in any way, despite that his best friend—Prompto, not Ignis—had always been openly so. There was no reason to believe Noct himself was anything more than a supportive ally to his queer friends, and Ignis thanked gods he didn’t even worship that Noct was forgiving of the kiss he had forced upon him that day.

What had he been thinking?

Why _hadn’t_ he been thinking?

How could he have done such a thing?

Questions Ignis had plied himself with for the last ten years, but instead of answers he only found shame and remorse for his actions.

He yearned to apologize before they both possibly shuffled off this mortal coil for good. But on the other hand, why tear open old wounds now? Why send Noct to his death with the recollection of an uncomfortable moment that happened on the worst day of his life? No, Ignis’s desire for forgiveness was for himself; Noct did not seem to need or want an apology, or to discuss it at all.

 _If we survive, we can talk about it_ , Ignis decided, and that was a big ‘if.’ Much bigger, in fact, than he had let on to Noct, for while he _was_ fairly certain that he was descended from Ardyn, the conclusion that his ancestry meant that sacrificing his own life alongside Noct’s would trigger a loophole in the prophecy was wild speculation based upon the clever semantics of words writ in an ancient tongue.

The greater certainty was that _if_ he perished in this attempt, then Noct would remain claimed by the prophecy anyhow, and therefore would never have to learn that Ignis had overstated his confidence in the odds of his own survival. It was possible, Ignis supposed, that Noct could survive without Ignis, and then he might know that Ignis had erred, but at least he would live to be angry with him.

Ignis would gladly accept that outcome, if it was the only one in which Noct lived.

But the third—and worst—possible outcome was the permutation in which Noct might die but Ignis survived, condemned to a life of knowing he had failed to save him, knowing there was still so much more he would like to have said, and living the rest of his days in a world absent the person who most made life worth living.

_(But at least he would have tried.)_

Disaster bisexual indeed.

Noct half turned toward him as though to speak, but his eyes remained fixed on the cupholder by Ignis’s knee. His brows knit even more tightly together. “Hey.”

“Hm?”

Even in profile, Ignis could see the difficult emotions dancing in the depths of Noct’s troubled eyes like flames; like swirling nebulae; like stars that he yearned to pluck from the heavens, cup in his hands, count, and name, but was prevented from doing so by the insurmountable vastness of space. “Thanks for sticking with me.”

Ignis’s breath caught. He didn’t know what to say that could possibly encompass all that he wanted to without pressing further discomfort upon Noct. So with his heart hammering in his chest and his features struggling not to telegraph too much, he simply said, “...Always.”

The truck descended into a tunnel that traversed beneath the Financial District, and before long they were stopped before a metal gate that had to be lifted by the two Kingsglaive posted at its guard before they could drive through. Ignis and Talcott were no new faces to them, but they peered with open curiosity and wonder at the third passenger pressed against his right shoulder while the gate slowly retracted into the ceiling.

Ten years, and Ignis had nearly forgotten what it was like to travel alongside a celebrity. Perhaps now a messiah.

He nodded to the glaives in greeting, and both suddenly remembered themselves and bowed deeply to Noct. Noct nodded and lifted his hand to wave, but the glaives’ heads remained bowed until the truck passed through.

“Guess we don’t fly under the radar anymore, huh?”

“They know of our arrival,” Ignis explained. “And yours has been eagerly foretold for years. You’ve become something of a legend, a savior destined to conquer the daemons and restore light to the world.”

“Hmm, and who told _that_ story?”

Ignis opened his mouth to give a straight answer until he realized Noct was smirking at him, and then he promptly closed it and shifted self-consciously. “I wasn’t the _first_ ,” he defended.

“Mm hmm.”

As the truck rolled slowly through the narrow tunnel, lesser daemons shrieked in the headlights and scurried away. They posed no threat to a moving vehicle, and even less so one carrying five armed combatants, so they took no action; It was generally considered prudent to leave the small ones as they were when feasible to ignore them, lest they recorporealize as a much larger problem.

“The people needed hope, and more importantly a reason to retain faith in the monarchy. Many would not welcome you back as King without believing you will earn such a lofty position by accomplishing the impossible.”

Noct gazed thoughtfully out the window as the truck rumbled steadily along, darkness and glowing-eyed imps giving way to lit subway tile.

“So these Kingsglaive. Are they…”

“Some fled Insomnia,” Ignis supplied. “All claim they were not involved in the betrayal. Most by now are recruits newer than that incident, and all have pledged loyalty to King and Crown. They no longer share the Power of Kings; they are simply excellently trained in a variety of combat styles, including those of our international allies.”

Noct bobbed his head carefully. “Did we ever...prosecute anyone for it?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Ignis caught Talcott briefly turning his head toward them, and then quickly reverting his attention to the road ahead.

“Only one,” Ignis replied, “who boldly touted that he had been a participant in the treason after we made the decision to accept the Kingsglaive refugees back into our ranks on condition of their claim of innocence.”

“To the...full extent of the law?”

There was a hesitation in his voice that underscored how untempered he was by this world in which they had been living for the decade past. It occurred to Ignis then that, by now, the man on his left may have been more hardened by life than the man on his right.

“The process was rather abbreviated, but yes, high treason remains punishable by death.”

His delivery was not ungentle or unkind, but Noct quickly inhaled, nodded, and looked away as though he very much did not wish to discuss or ponder it any further. “Right.”

The truck rolled to a stop at the entrance of a pedestrian concourse too narrow for the vehicle. “We’ll need to walk from here, Your Majesty,” announced Talcott, “but it isn’t very far.”

The three men disembarked from the vehicle, and Talcott and Ignis immediately went to the rear of the truck to assist Gladio and Prompto in unloading the cargo. No one asked him to assist, of course, but Noct hefted one of the more solidly packed crates into his arms without a word.

“What’s in the boxes?” he asked with a slightly anxious grimace that gave Ignis the impression he was rapidly regretting his choice of parcel.

Prompto balanced a stack of smaller boxes which Ignis knew was no light fare in and of itself. “Oh, medical supplies...dried meat...fifty pounds of Ebony.”

“ _Two cases_ of Ebony,” Ignis corrected, “which hardly accounts for more than _eight_ pounds at most.”

“Riiiight,” Prompto drawled, very suddenly affecting a voice strained by the weight of at least five garulas and adopting a labored gait to match. “ _Much lighter._ ”

Ignis shot his most dramatic friend a bland eyebrow raise over his shoulder. In his own hand he tightly gripped one rope handle of the largest and heaviest wooden crate; Gladio was on its other end. Neither complained. “What Prompto is attempting to misdirect from is that _your_ box contains roughly thirty pounds of chocobo feed, which they might have carried _themselves_ instead of leaving the king to dirty his royal finery so soon before our arrival.”

“Who?” inquired Noct.

“Prompto.”

“Huh?”

“Ah.” Ignis smiled in spite of himself. Yes, that had rather been an oversight, hadn’t it? So preoccupied had they been with so many other topics, and so long Noct had been gone. “Prompto, would you like to have a chat with Noct?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Miraculously, all signs of strain and struggle had vanished from Prompto’s voice. “It’s no big, I just use ‘they’ now.”

“‘They’ who?”

“‘They’ me. They. Them. For me.”

“Oh! You mean like you’re—”

“Nonbinary, mostly agender. I feel a _bit_ more affinity toward the masculine than the feminine, but I feel way closer to something that is neither, so yeah, I stick to gender-neutral pronouns now.”

“Oh! Cool! Yeah! That’s cool! Shit. Have I been, like...misgendering you since forever?”

Prompto gave a hesitant chuckle. “We-ell, no more than I was misgendering myself...”

Noct’s eyes widened with something akin to horror. “Six, I’m so sorry. If I had known—”

“Well, yeah, I mean, if _I_ had known—”

“Eyes forward, Noct.”

Noct halted at Ignis’s warning and rerouted himself narrowly before walking into a support pillar. His thinly veiled panic gave way to a deep and distant mournfulness. “Geez...I’ve really been out of the loop.”

“Mmm...that’ll happen when you’ve been gone ten years,” agreed Gladio.

“So, like... Anything else I should know about? What’s been going on with the rest of you?”

“Eh, same shit, more daemons. Fewer haircuts.”

“An unfortunate dearth of razors,” mourned Ignis.

“You hoarding them all?”

“What I can.”

“Yeaahh, I think this one is going,” asserted Prompto with a grimace. “I thought I’d give _‘au naturel’_ a shot what with shortages and all, but, it’s just not _me_.”

“I’ll share my supply,” Ignis offered.

Prompto sighed happily. “True friendship.”

“What about you, Talcott?”

Talcott had been quiet in the back of their convoy, and when Ignis chanced a glance over his shoulder at him, he seemed surprised to be called upon by the King. “Oh! Me? Well, I’ve been in charge of transports, mostly, and recordkeeping. Ignis and I used to go on excursions in the Lucii tombs.”

“Yes,” Ignis praised, “you were an invaluable assistant, even when you were young.”

“It’s been a while since we’ve gone. But I...guess we won’t be going anymore now that King Noctis is back, huh?”

“Ah, no. I found what I was looking for.”

A silence fell over them. Gladio and Prompto were aware of the plan; Talcott was not. Nor was Prompto nor Gladio any more strongly in favor of it than Noct had been, but as they had far less say in the matter than Noct did and respected the privacy of both men, they held their tongues on their opinions even now.

Which was just as well, for they had reached the end of the pedestrian concourse. The heavy metal door at its end swung open, and the grizzled man who opened it swiftly took the box from Noct’s hands.

“Cor!”

“Welcome back, Your Majesty.” The Marshal set the box down, and bowed to Noct with fist over heart. “I hope you’re up for some introductions, because I’ve got a number of people here who have been waiting a very long time to meet you.”

* * *

‘A number of people’ didn’t prepare Noctis for what awaited him on the other side of that door, nor for the significance they placed on meeting the King of Light. Cor announced him to a room of some thirty or so Glaives recovering from a battle that seemed to have gone very, very badly. Most were bleeding. Some were crying. The context was clear; they had lost a number of comrades and friends out there, and those who had made it back had done so just barely.

But there was some context Noct was missing, and he gathered it lay in Ignis’s words in the car earlier. Despite that Noct recognized absolutely zero of these faces, and despite that he had not received _nearly_ so much attention from the citizens as the Crown Prince of Lucis, they gazed upon him now with reverence and rapture. They scrambled to their feet; they wept openly. More Glaives poured out of every corner of this small underground compound that had once been a subway station until there were fifty, maybe seventy-five uniformed men, women, and other awestruck individuals all desperate for the sight of him. Gasping their disbelief and weeping words of fealty. To his shame, he couldn’t remember most of the names that Cor rattled off to him while he inwardly struggled to grapple with the sheer enormity of it all, but somehow, he meant _everything_ to these strangers.

_‘You’ve become something of a legend, a savior destined to conquer the daemons and restore light to the world.’_

No small thing to live up to.

No small thing to die for.

_All right. You’re a king, Noct. They’re looking to you for leadership. You can do this._

“Warriors of Lucis,” he addressed, forcing strength into his voice that he hoped would carry him through improvising the rest of something at least coherent, if not inspirational. He had seen and heard his father give countless speeches throughout his life, and if he could just channel that...maybe he could be what they needed. Maybe he could be whatever a king was supposed to be at a time like this.

The faces that gazed solemnly back at him showed no indication of catching on that he was faking it until making it, and that emboldened him. Noct gave the crowd a solid nod. A _manly_ nod. “You’ve done well these past ten years, and I thank you.”

He paced the floor as he sought his next words, and amazingly his audience remained patient and attentive despite his momentary silence. “I know that...it couldn’t have been easy, in this world that I left behind, ravaged by daemons and starved for sunlight. But I want you to know that I didn’t leave to escape, but to obtain the Power of Kings and the blessing of gods; the power that we need to eradicate the darkness from the skies and let the sun shine once again; the power that will reclaim our planet from the Starscourge and restore our kingdom—the _whole_ kingdom.”

There were excited murmurs among the crowd, and Noct wondered how groundbreaking a concept that truly was. He had lived his entire charmed life in Insomnia until the siege, and Insomnia had a way of seeming like it was the entire world. Had he been anyone else, he might have been forgiven the naivety of assuming the rest of the kingdom functioned as Insomnia did, but with more highways and greasier curly fries.

Unable to escape that one pesky conditional, however, he didn’t think it was excusable. Yet even after spending almost a year living outside the wall, traveling the kingdom incognito as a hunter and meeting all sorts of different people and cultures in the rural regions, he may have perhaps only had a superficial understanding of what their lives were like in Old Lestallum, Longwythe, Galahd, Ravatogh— or how they had become accustomed to being treated by the monarchy. Of course he wished to restore the entire kingdom. Why wouldn’t he?

Civil unrest: the increasingly violent sentiments of a people toward their governing body when they felt they weren’t being governed properly. He had known Niflheim as an enemy since birth, but the idea that a fatal coup d’etat might be organized from within had completely blindsided him. And the worst of it all was that even after his father’s death he carried some of that ignorance and naivety with him still. Even when he was the one now responsible for these people and their lives.

Because he had never been raised to rule. 

Some of the people in this room might have been the ones who betrayed his father, he knew. But he wasn’t here to hunt and persecute. This was the end of the world; he was here to forgive.

There were so many eyes gazing back at him. Eyes full of fear, eyes full of hope, eyes full of sorrow and eyes full of determination. They weren’t all guilty. Noct looked back into some of those eyes and nodded, mostly to solidify his own resolve. “I know that everyone in this room has made grave sacrifices. I know that there are people who aren’t here who have made even bigger sacrifices.” He swallowed tightly, the memory of Luna’s sad smile on the day that she died floating before his mind’s eye unbidden, undeserved. The boldface headlines announcing the murder of a king at the hands of the predecessors of this very organization. Noct took a deep breath. “I want you to know, that as your King, I am prepared to make whatever sacrifices it will take to recover our home.”

He wanted to say more. He wanted to talk about what kind of future he wanted—for Eos, for Lucis, for _them_. He wanted to talk about unity, and class equality, and acceptance of those who were atypical of the mainstream in various ways. But he knew that he couldn’t promise any of that because he might not be here to see it through, and even imparting his hopes and dreams for what might continue without him would reveal his intent to die, and that…

He didn’t want to have to burden any more people with that. Those who already knew were enough. Too many.

“I ask you...to continue to have faith in Lucis,” he implored, as openly as he dared. “To have faith in each other.” He looked around the room one more time, at this disparate array of strangers whose lives, alongside many others, would be saved with his death. “And in me.”

He lifted his arm high and summoned his sword from the armiger, clasping its hilt firmly above his head. “For Lucis!”

“ _For Lucis!_ ” the crowd howled back at him, and then erupted in cheers and applause.

There was some handshaking then, and some stragglers who wanted to tell him about their kids whom they were fighting for, or their parents’ last words to them, or how inspired they had been by the tale of the King of Light and knowing that the prince of their kingdom—the king whom they served—was the mythological figure who would save them all. Several mentioned the bloody ordeal they had just returned from. Most dispersed back to their duties, and before long the gravity of Noct’s underlying anxieties found him at Ignis’s side again, concealing a self-conscious wince with a nervous eyebrow raise.

Speaking of futures he desperately wanted to see.

“How did I do?”

Some inscrutable emotion flickered across Ignis’s eyes. Wistfulness? Sorrow? Pride? “You’re a natural.”

“Yeah? It wasn’t too—”

“Noct!”

In perhaps the first great question mark surrounding the matter of the new king’s personal security, Noctis was unceremoniously barreled into by a petite woman with a long brown ponytail. That, and the two katanas strapped to her back, and the frightening strength of her vice grip were the only descriptors available to Noct regarding his surprisingly emotional assailant—whom he did believe was now crying—until Ignis greeted her with entirely different concerns.

“Iris, thank goodness you’re all right. I gather many weren’t today.”

“Iris?!”

It was then that she loosened her hold around Noct’s torso and pulled back just far enough to smile up at him with wet eyes and tear-stained cheeks. Holy shit. There were dark circles under her eyes, and a scar on her cheek, and her face was much gaunter than it should have been, but the woman was unmistakably Iris Amicita. Beaming with unbridled joy at Noct, she nodded and wiped the tears from her eyes, but the jubilance of this reunion was compromised by the dolor of Ignis’s words, and her smile quickly gave way to a bone-deep fatigue.

“It’s getting worse out there,” she said—to Ignis, mostly, and then seemed to belatedly remember she ought to have been briefing her king as well. “Here in the Crown City, it’s all Yojimbos and Nagarani and red giants. Killing them only brings back stronger ones in their place. If you weren’t here, we might have to abandon the city entirely.”

Noctis nodded, his brow set in fierce resolve. “I am here,” he promised.

“Yeah…” Iris chewed nervously on her lip, then glanced at Ignis. “Hey, um... Gladdy was looking for you.”

“Oh?” Ignis looked to Noctis apologetically. “If you’ll excuse me, Noct.” It was a courtesy, familiar if unnecessary. He bowed his head and took his leave without awaiting a response.

Iris might have noticed the anxious way Noctis’s eyes trailed after his Advisor, for she nudged his arm opposite his gaze with her elbow and attempted to lift his spirits with a hesitant smile. “Long time no see?”

It was unmistakably a question, not of whether the time had been long, but of whether the reunion was welcome. Noctis realized that after a brief synaptic delay, then quickly scrambled to appear fifty percent less nervous about everything that was about to go down in the next twenty-four hours and roughly three hundred percent more excited to see her.

“Yeah, hey! Gods. Sorry. How are you?”

“Well, I mean the world is in shambles, I fight daemons on the daily, and it’s been _literally_ ten years since I’ve had a Kenny Burger, buuut…” She clasped her hands behind her back and flashed her most charming smile and—you know—she really did become pretty in those ten years, despite whatever tolls it had taken on her. “...you’re here...so I guess it’s the best day I’ve had all week.”

Noctis smiled meekly. “Glad to rank above daemons for you. Sorry I didn’t bring Kenny Crow’s.”

“I caught the end of your speech. Sounds to me like you’re planning to bring back something better.”

He inhaled deeply. “Yeah…”

The atmosphere between them shifted perceptibly, and Iris discarded coquettishness in favor of steadfast determination. “I believe you can do it, Noct. And my men and I will help you clear a path to the Citadel. Gladdy doesn’t want me going any further than that in case—well, in case we both—you know, the house—and—”

She flustered to avoid the statement, opting for vague gesticulation in place of words, and Noct’s throat tightened when he realized what she was trying to say. He held her wrists to still her hands, and the skin beneath his fingertips was far rougher than it should have been.

“Gladio will be back safely. I promise.”

She blinked at him in surprise, or possibly to stifle tears. Her cheeks flushed. “Yeah, well um—you too, all right?!”

Noct took a deep breath and released her, straightening his posture. “I’ll do my best.” He hesitated, unsure of how much more he should say. “But my priority is the kingdom.”

A nervous laughter escaped Iris, and she wiped the tears from her eyes with a hint of scorn for their very presence, or maybe the bitter irony of the circumstances. “Gods. King Noctis. Here we are.”

“Here we are…”

“Long may He reign.”

“Swiftly may Kenny Crow’s return.” Noctis frowned, gazing into middle space. “But not the actual crow. That thing was creepy.”

“Just the burgers.”

“Just the burgers. And the fries. And the salmon bowl. Gods, there’s really only dry rations around here?”

Iris grinned. “Mostly, and what isn’t dry is rationed even tighter. But go ask Ignis if you want some real food; you know he always has the hookup, and I’m sure exceptions will be made for you.” She nodded her head in the direction in which Ignis had left, a sad smile on her face.

Noctis returned the smile warmly, nodded, and made to leave.

“Hey! Um— Noct?”

“Hm?” He halted and gave her his attention once again.

“I just, um…” Iris cleared her throat and ran her hand through her long bangs, a troubled frown fixed firmly upon the worn subway tiles beneath their feet. Something was clearly on her mind, but after some momentary deliberation she only smiled and shook her head, waving the issue away with her hand before even dragging her eyes away from the subway tiles. “You know what? Never mind. There was something I wanted to talk to you about, but I think we all have more important things to focus on first.”

Noctis shifted uneasily. There was a wide array of serious topics he did not want to discuss with Iris at all, but if there was something she wanted to say, and knowing this might be her last chance to say it… “Are you sure?”

“Yeah, totally,” she breathed, nodding and smiling with all the conviction in the world. “After the battle, yeah? I’d rather talk to you while the sun is shining.”

 _Me too_ , he thought, but only gave her one more assuring smile, nodded firmly, and took off to find Ignis.

* * *

_Obscene._

Ignis was perched in the doorway of what served as the Lucian forces’ weight room with his arms folded across his chest and a tight frown directed at the measured and rhythmic display of rippling flesh before him. Like some horrific scene of gory roadkill strewn across the highway, it rendered him no more capable of looking away than he was of dispelling the grimace from his countenance that would have so clearly broadcast his distaste were anyone to note him in the doorway.

Not that he found the human body itself to be obscene, or that there was anything amoral about physical fitness, or that he expected anyone to engage in it whilst keeping an uncomfortable amount of perspiring skin stifled beneath clothing. Rather, it was that some individuals dared to look like _that_ , had the audacity to strive for even higher levels of physical perfection, and had barely a care as to what the rest of them mere mortals were to do with themselves. 

“You can’t possibly have summoned me simply to watch this.”

The clanging of the weight machine stopped, and Gladio looked at Ignis in bewilderment between heaving breaths, noticing him there for the first time. “What?”

“Iris said you were looking for me.”

“No I wasn’t.”

Ignis opened his mouth to argue the blatant mistruth, then closed it with a rueful smirk. “Ah…” He stepped into the room and took a seat at the less occupied end of Gladio’s weight bench. Other users continued operating equipment on the other side of the room, creating a repetitive mechanical background noise. “I believe I have been sent away.”

“By who?” Not quite there yet, it would seem.

“By your sister, gunning to be the next Queen of Lucis, evidently.”

Gladio smirked and sat upright, at last locating the metaphorical page Ignis was on, and swung one leg over the bench so that they were seated side by side as he caught his breath. “ _You’re_ the one who taught her to be a tactician. She knows which fortifications to dismantle, and in what order.”

Ignis splayed his palms helplessly, then clasped both hands together between his parted knees. “Indeed, I’ve only myself to blame. And to congratulate. I’ll accept the defeat for the triumph.”

Gladio looked at him, snorted, and shook his head. He opted to reach for his water bottle and hydrate himself over issuing a statement.

Undaunted, Ignis arched an eyebrow at him. “What?”

“Theme of the week, isn’t it?”

Ignis looked away. “...Ah.” A questionably opaque response for a typically over-opinionated man, and Gladio knew it.

“I don’t like it,” he said, quiet enough to remain contained by the din of workouts on the other side of the room but firm enough to be unmistakably pointed.

“I know you don’t.”

“Why lose both of you?”

“The plan is to not lose _either_ of us.”

“No, it’s not a plan;” Gladio refuted, “it’s a gamble. You know better than anyone that gambles don’t always win.”

Ignis drew a long inhale through his nose and looked around the weight room. What _was_ a plan but a series of calculated wagers, risk assessment, and determination of acceptable losses? It was prioritization of goals and attempted manipulation of the outcome. It was organization and enactment, skill and responsiveness. But a plan was always, always a gamble.

“Some things are worth risking all for,” he said quietly.

Gladio grunted his dissatisfaction. “Maybe for you, but not for the rest of us. Have you considered how fucked we’ll be if you _both_ die?”

“I have. You and Cor would do just fine. You have Libertus.” He turned to Gladio again with a wan but pleasant smile. “And Iris, The Tactician.”

“None of us are politicians.”

“Keep Aranea and Ravus on your side; beware Camellia. Aranea wants camaraderie. Ravus wants respect. Camellia wants power. Indulge the former two and delude the latter. And don’t write Solara off as a child; she is an unknown quantity, and a powerful one.”

Gladio swore under his breath, shook his head, and looked away. Ignis was content to allow him to do so, for he knew he could never get Gladio to _agree_ with this scheme; merely to accept it. If that.

He was grateful he even had that.

A silence settled upon them, and neither man sought to fill it with sociable nonsense. The familiar soundtrack of the fitness room was enough.

“...It should be me,” Gladio said after some length, his gaze focused on a stack of weights some yards away. “I’m his Shield.”

“It doesn’t seem to work that way.”

Gladio snorted in derision. “Well the gods have a sick sense of humor, giving the King a Shield and then deciding it doesn’t mean shit in the end.”

Ignis bit his tongue on that. House Amicitia had ever espoused its ancestral position as one of divine mandate, as was that of House Caelum’s Line of Lucis. But there was no proof to support such a claim and few dared contend it; those who did were perceived as being disloyal to King and Crown. Or persistently pedantic lovers of facts, and on that count, Ignis had already advocated for the devil enough times that he did not need to challenge Gladio’s faith in the holiness of his appointment once again.

Especially now.

“I’ll do my best to come back and curse them with you.”

“You’d better.”

“And should I not—”

Gladio turned his whole upper body toward him abruptly. “Don’t.”

Ignis studied his face: the rigid lines of age, exhaustion, and scars; the cold set of his amber eyes, honed by design to cause men who were not Ignis Scientia to crumble and wither under their intensity; and there, buried in their depths, in the slight twitch of a facial muscle, the underlying fear of losing not one but two of his best friends. Two of the only family he had left.

Ignis nodded. “Very well.”

Noct bolted past the doorway then, backtracked, and halted in the door frame. “Oh. Hey. There you are. Iris said you might have food?”

Ignis smirked quietly into his lap, and thought he heard a snicker from Gladio. He was tempted to make light of the situation— _‘Ah yes, my own divine calling; Ignis Scientia, Personal Chef to His Majesty’_ —but the uncomfortable knowledge that this could very well be the last chance they all had to enjoy a home cooked meal together neutered his wit.

He tried to look more amenable than sad when he looked back up at Noct, he really did. “I would be happy to prepare something for you, though I must warn you that the menu is not gourmet these days.”

“As long as it’s not ‘just add water,’ I’m fine with it.”

“Hey.” Gladio snorted. “You all made fun of my love of Cup Noodles for years and I’ll have you know it saved our asses many times when fresh food got scarce.”

By habit and nostalgia, he expected a quip about the unpleasantness of vegetables. Then perhaps someone might tease him about his caffeine addiction, Prompto could join them and fret about calories, and Noct would inevitably suggest that they all go fishing instead. But it never came. Instead, Noct’s eyes widened and he gazed at Gladio as though he had just learned a puppy had died, or realized he had vacated his kingdom for the entire duration of a famine. “...Yeah.”

After an uncomfortable beat of relative silence, Ignis stood. “Let us fetch Prompto and make a proper feast of it. Iris, too, if she is hungry.”

“Do we— Is there enough for a feast?” Noct asked.

“There is enough to feed the King and his retinue a proper meal before riding off into battle, nor will that deplete our stores. If we are successful in our goals tomorrow, it’s still early enough in the year for freshly planted crops to yield a late autumn harvest.”

“Well, can I...help?”

There was an anxiety about him that Ignis couldn’t quite place. A yearning for...something. The desire to busy himself, perhaps, to take his mind off the trials ahead. Or perhaps it was normalcy that he longed for. Whatever it was, it was writ large in his navy blue eyes, pleading with Ignis for permission that he of all people did not need to request from anyone.

But the earnestness of it couldn’t help but solicit a smile that spread slowly across Ignis’s face, a warmth that flooded his chest despite the clammy dampness of the subway terminal they had made their home away from home, thick in this room with the sweat of trainees. He nodded, and granted his King consent to serve.

Gladio swung one leg over the weight bench and resumed the ungodly position he had been in prior to Ignis’s interruption. “Meet you there in twenty.”

King and Advisor left him to it, and set off to recover lost years in at least one capacity.


	4. Chapter 4

The city was a bleak hellscape that had been completely surrendered to the daemons beyond the sanctuary of the LR Citadel Station. Artifacts of human life circa May 756 were frozen in time, captured in bus stop posters and street litter and random objects that people left behind during the evacuation. Now they served as the playthings of imps and arachnes hissing and chittering as they passed.

Iris was fierce and ruthless as she cut through the front lines with a contingent of Kingsglaive, but strategic enough about it that they endured no casualties. Watching her at first glance, you’d think she was a complete force of passion and chaos, hurling herself into battle whichever way the bloodlust carried her and slicing up a salad of daemons in her wake—a berserker, like her brother, though she favored lighter arms and was _fast_ , like Prompto. But if you paid attention, you’d notice that every battle decision was methodical and rational, every foe analyzed and dismantled in the quickest and most efficient manner. The unmistakable influences of Ignis and Cor.

Noct’s inner circle stayed tightly together, while Cor lingered close to Iris and the contingent. The way Ignis, Gladio, and Prompto fought together was unreal; the way they read each other’s body movements and anticipated one another’s actions and needs before they even happened almost spiritual. By comparison, Noctis felt like an interloper, no longer their commander or the linchpin of their social dynamic, but maybe an elite escort quest they had picked up along the way. He did, however, feel he was in the safest hands.

The Citadel was an estranged family member, once so intimately known, so blithely taken for granted, now cold and foreign and unfeeling. Empty. The halls he had run through irreverently as a kid now housed the ghosts of his childhood; the only familial homecoming his corrupted ancestors greeting him with shuriken and mace and sword. _Godspeed, young King. Pray succeed where we have failed._

Ravus was there, as stony faced as ever. The custodian of his father’s sword for a decade, now a Lucian relic unable to be wielded by anyone outside the Lucian bloodline. He made no challenge to Noct’s claim—this time—but Noct felt no warmth in the transfer of property, nor in the measured scrutiny of Ravus’s unsettingly mismatched eyes when he rose from his bow and called him Majesty.

Ardyn. The Immortal. The Accursed. How pitiful he was in the end, lashing out at ghosts and begging for an end to his two-thousand year nightmare, not in his words but in his deeds. It wasn’t about Noctis; it had never been. _Did he know?_ In the end, it didn’t matter. Noctis looked for some trace of them in his eyes—some part of Luna, some part of Ignis, some sign of remorse for all the suffering he had caused every single person alive—and found only hatred and a single-minded concern with his own pain. His own failed relationship with his brother. Family drama, dragged across the entire planet and over two millennia, painted across the whole of the sky.

When Noctis granted him the end he so craved, he realized that wondering if he had _known_ was the wrong question. Even if he had, Noctis no longer believed he would have cared.

Upon his death, daemons began spawning en masse, as though the very energy that he released into the air polluted the entire city. Noctis and Ignis parted ways with the others at the steps of the Citadel with little time for sentimentality; it was uncertain how long Ardyn’s spirit would remain in the Beyond, or how long their forces could hold off the Scourge.

Perhaps that was why anxiety gripped him only when he reached the uppermost dais of the throne room; when there was nowhere left to go, no external struggle left to overcome, not even the petty but welcome physical distraction of having stairs to climb. There was nothing left before him but the throne, and the Crystal, and...and Ignis.

Ignis shouldn’t be here, oh gods. But there he was, climbing the other set of stairs and coming to a stop before Noctis, looking at him, searching him, each with nothing left to face but the other. And mortality. And the gods.

“Iggy, if you want to go back with the others—”

“I don’t.”

“I’m just saying, I would forgive you.”

“I would not.”

Noctis sighed and bowed his head. He knew that this discussion, if had again, would only lead to the same place it had led before and they would accomplish nothing new except for wasting precious minutes that their friends needed to stay alive outside. For better or for worse, this was where things were at, and there was nothing to do but press on.

_A king pushes forward always, accepting the consequences and never looking back._

He didn’t want to disappoint Ignis now by waffling, by losing resolve. He was tempted to command Ignis to leave him here—Ignis had _said_ he would obey if he did; Noct _had_ that power—but he knew he would only be ripping Ignis’s personal autonomy away from him by invoking royal authority. He imagined the words in his mouth, envisioned Ignis leaving if he said them. Envisioned him escaping to safety and living the rest of his long life in the sunlight. But when it came to it, he couldn’t bring himself to order something for Ignis that directly went against what Ignis would choose for himself.

Maybe having power over someone came into direct conflict with the responsibility not to use it. That would be important, he thought, if he ever got to be King.

Even still, his hands trembled so violently when he lifted them that he could only stare at them for a moment and wonder if he would even have the strength to do this to himself, or what would happen if he just passed out here while the entire world was outside waiting for him to do something impressive. Ignis quickly tucked his gloves into his pocket and clasped Noct’s hand, left palm to left palm, and squeezed it so tightly the sweat trapped between them beaded out the sides. Noctis was glad for it, glad they were skin-to-skin. He didn’t want to be holding a glove when he died.

When he died…

~~When _they_ died.~~

Noctis swallowed, and looked into Ignis’s eyes, which were looking back at him with a mixture of fear and resolve and apprehension. He had been looking into those eyes his whole life, but _gods_ how he had taken it for granted. How distant they had seemed behind his glasses—no, Noct realized, it was behind the way that Ignis had guarded himself, the cards he had always kept close to his chest, but he wasn’t guarding himself now. He nodded quickly in rapid succession, looking from one of Noct’s eyes to the other, urging him on.

Noct squeezed his hand and steeled himself. “Always,” he whispered.

“Always,” Ignis agreed, and his voice cracked on the utterance.

It was more than a word, coming from Ignis. It was an assurance and a reminder. It was everything.

_Always, I am with you._

_Always, I have not let you down._

_Always, I will love you._

_Always._

_Always._

_Always, it always should have been you, always, oh gods—_

With an anguished cry involuntarily escaping his throat, Noctis flung his right arm outward toward the empty throne room before he lost whatever nerve he had and called upon the last addition to his Armiger. His fingers tightened around the sword that materialized in his hand, the weight familiar but its precise shape not. “Kings of Lucis,” he growled out to the darkness, but his eyes never left Ignis’s, and Ignis’s never left his. “Come to me!”

Noctis thrust the blade into the ground beside them, fencing them between the sword and the throne, and mythril pierced marble in a way it should not have. It was magic, he knew, and a mere magician’s trick compared to the magic he was calling upon now.

This was the full magic of their kingdom. This was the strongest magic Eos possessed.

They materialized all around them, glowing blue specters encroaching ominously upon their prey from all corners of the throne room. It was only then that Noct’s eyes flickered away from Ignis’s, and how could they not when faced with the supernatural wonder of the Old Wall? His ancestors, their forebears, the most powerful human entities Eos had ever known. Near demigods, in their own right. Twelve in all— no, thirteen.

Oh...

The Lucii wasted no time on pleasantries. The largest among them, the Mystic, lifted his great sword high and closed in on Noctis with deadly aim. 

Ignis turned to look, and the last thing Noctis registered before the pain drowned out all else was Ignis quickly pulling their bodies together in the milliseconds before the sword ran them both through.

For blades forged of light, the damage they induced was quite tangible. Noctis barely had a moment to gasp in agony or to respond to Ignis’s anguished cries before the next one came, tearing through his shoulder, and then his thigh, and then his flank, and some rent Noctis more than Ignis and some rent Ignis more than Noctis, but every blow took something away from him. They were unyielding and indiscriminate in whether it was the King of Light they killed or the man slumped against him, even well past the point where neither man could have hoped to escape this encounter without bleeding to death. A sacrificial lamb and a casualty. No matter. No mercy.

By the time their onslaught permitted any reprieve, Noctis and Ignis both had long since been brought upon their knees, propped up only by the body of the other. Ignis was so still that Noctis feared for a fleeting, panicked moment that he was already dead until he felt the shallow heaving of his labored breaths and the gargantuan effort of angling his face into Noct’s hair with what must have been every last ounce of his strength. Of his life.

He said something, but Noctis couldn’t hear him. Was his voice failing, or Noct’s hearing? How strange, the sensation of dying… to let one’s body fail completely, to surrender entirely the grasp on one’s only physical vessel in this world, the only tether between the spirit and life itself. And to be okay with that.

With his own last ounce of strength and life, Noctis rested his hand on Ignis’s bloodsoaked hip and strained to turn his gaze upward at the last figure looming over them.

How darkly resplendent he had become in death. How fearsome, and powerful, and eternal, just like all these mystical figures he had always taught him about.

An angel of mercy.

An unexpected chance to say goodbye.

“Dad,” Noctis croaked weakly, pleading.

And then the Sword of the Father took his pain away.

* * *

At first, death was the sensation of nothingness. There was no feeling, no surroundings, and no awareness of past or future, but only what was, and the vague sensation of something—or someone—‘other.’ Slowly, the realization came to him that he had awareness at all, and he wondered if death was supposed to be this way or if this was an anomaly that one should cease to exist and yet experience the lack of his own existence.

Did he exist? Was he existing? What was this place? Was there a place? Who was he?

Noct. He was Noctis. Noctis Lucis Caelum, born to Regis and Aulea Lucis Caelum. He had been in a state like this before. It was important. _He_ was important.

He was a prince. No, he was a king. He had to save the world.

Ignis. Where was Ignis??

Before the panic of something missing could fully take hold, that awareness of the presence of an other grew and became more distinct. It was warm and familiar, something that had been there for a very long time. A friend. A brother. Something closer than that.

The other was aware of him too, and there was a mutual understanding of togetherness. A shared sensation of warmth. A completeness.

So too was there an increasing sensation of space—or, rather, the sensation of moving forward in space, toward something, though there were still no surroundings to mark the passage of this movement. Ahead was something dark, something angry and inevitable...something in pain.

Noct knew it; had met it in life. But this was a different sense of ‘knowing’ entirely. He could feel the pain in its soul, the anger, the impatience, the— _yearning_. It yearned for something—someone—beyond the mortal realm, and it was angry they had been taken away.

Even despite that, there was no sense of relief that an end was nigh, only the thrashing of discontent. No matter how much it wanted what was on the other side, it would not go gently into that good night.

_Rage, rage against the dying of the Light._

Ignis was with him, and his spirit resonated with the reassurance of his presence. He could feel his soul like a blanket, a warm bath. It would be inaccurate to say they simply accompanied one another and more accurate to say they were _together_ , completely, like sunshine and a warm spring day are together. Like comfort and home are together, or the melody and notes of a song. They were intertwined, they mingled, they were _one_. Together they attempted to overcome the third presence, to subdue its anger, but it only raged harder at their audacity. It thrashed and flailed and pushed them away, and for a moment it seemed they would be consumed by this being’s pain instead of defeating it.

No, no, they couldn’t come this far to lose, to lose everything, to lose each other, they _couldn’t_ —

Suddenly, there was a Light, and that Light swelled with immeasurable brilliance. Immeasurable _power_. The strength of Noctis’s and Ignis’s souls paled in comparison, and even the Anger was paltry in its shadow. But there was no shadow, for this Light encompassed everything, all of them, and it grew and grew until it filled every corner of their souls and through it they felt one another, the three of them.

Noct knew this entity, and knew in that moment that it was the most powerful being on Eos.

It touched the Anger, and the Anger was subdued by it, not by force but by invitation. The Anger, too, knew it, and yielded willingly under its loving touch until every trace of hate that had emanated from it was replaced by the overwhelming peace and serenity of this union. For a moment, Noct wondered if this was Heaven, if they would simply be enveloped like this forever and never return to their lives, and frankly…

He was okay with that. Because Ignis was here. And in that moment, to feel both Ignis’s soul and the overwhelming sensation of bliss that the Light provided, Noctis would have gladly relinquished all else just to feel this way forever.

Its divine mission accomplished, the Light began to recede with that which was no longer Anger, but a portion of it lingered behind with Noctis and Ignis. Something in it called to Noctis, impressed upon him some further purpose.

Ah… He couldn’t have explained it, couldn’t have placed how he knew—perhaps it was Divine Providence, or perhaps it was the Light itself that imparted this wisdom to him—but he knew what he had to do.

He felt the alarm in Ignis and felt the existential cold of his absence as Noct lingered behind and answered the call of the Light.

* * *

The first time that Ignis Scientia came to life was on February 7, 734: a tiny, screaming bundle wailing his way into a room of practiced professionals and anxious family members, finding himself at once swept up in sturdy arms and surrounded by love.

The second time Ignis Scientia came to life was on June 1, 766, and he was alone.

It was the searing pain that hit him before anything else. Air tore through his lungs like a knife, and it was agonizing moments before hearing returned and he realized that awful, ragged, heaving sound in the distance was in fact himself gasping for sustenance. Ignis had never thought breathing could _hurt_ so much, and he thought he was dying all over again until it occurred to him that senses, strength, and cognizance were returning to him rather than diminishing, and that nothing outside his straining lungs hurt sharply enough to indicate a mortal injury.

As oxygen flooded into his system, the blackness ebbed away from the center of his vision and corroborated with his nervous system to verify in the faint blue light of very early dawn that he was indeed on the floor of the ruined Citadel throne room, the cold obsidian of the throne itself hard and unforgiving pressed against his left shoulder; the deadweight of another human body slumped against his right.

“Noct,” he croaked, and oh gods it took all the strength he had in him and then some to shift his heavy limbs so that he could see Noct’s face and support his weight without them both slumping over. Sticky, half-congealed blood pooled beneath him and streaked Noct’s forehead as Ignis brushed his overgrown bangs from his eyes, but his skin was cool and his complexion was too gray in stark contrast to the swath of dark crimson that Ignis’s hand had painted across his skin.

Noct was not breathing.

Noct was not alive.

“Noct!” It was a raspy cry, a plea to the nothingness that barely sounded like his own voice. Memories of the Beyond flooded back to him: the union, the Anger, the Light, the coldness as Noct’s soul slipped away from him—

Gods—no—please—no— 

Had the gods claimed him anyhow in the end? Had he stayed behind of his own accord, determined not to let Ignis pay this price alongside him? If Noct did not survive, then everything was for naught. His single-minded years-long quest for a solution, the desperate planning, the sacrifice— foolish human machinations all, delusions of outsmarting gods that amounted to nothing but hubris and a cold body in place of the only person he had ever truly cared about saving.

Blood no longer flowing, rigor mortis already setting in. No amount of cautious optimism could delay the undeniable: Noct had been gone for hours, and wasn’t coming back.

_Not him—take me instead—take me—save him—please—_

But what good were his pleas to unconcerned gods?

He cradled Noct’s lifeless body to his chest now, rocking back and forth with his king’s too-cool face against the bare crook of his neck and keening like a wounded animal, dried blood and sweat soaked anew with the tears that streamed down his cheeks. The sun was unmistakably rising outside and morning crept in through the crumbled structure to embrace the Insomnian throne room like an estranged friend—like that day they had first met, here, _right here_ , in this very spot—but Ignis was far too overcome with his overwhelming grief to appreciate the miracle.

They say one’s life flashes before their eyes just before death, but Ignis did not experience that when the Lucii killed him. He felt it now instead, at the end of Noct’s life, cradling his corpse in his arms. Flashes of their childhood— of the impossible brightness of Noct’s smile, of his laughter, of the days of endless joy when they played together with few other concerns. When the world ahead seemed bright and large and promising and _theirs_. He recalled the troubling days of Noct’s illness and how they had become that much closer for it; Ignis’s voluntary participation in Noct’s secluded convalescence; creeping past governesses into one another’s beds to chase nightmares away. The turbulence of their teenage years, the difficult emotions, but through it all the sense that everything would be _worth it_ in the end— that all the pain, suffering, _sacrifice_ they endured now would carry them to a brighter tomorrow, where Noct was King and his kingdom was at peace.

Where they were at peace. And together.

The throne, the prophecy, himself and his love, this whole bloody kingdom…

Astrals take it all. Take any of it— _anything but Noct, anything but—_

Another ragged gasp cut through the air and Noct’s body spasmed so hard he jerked right out of Ignis’s still-weak arms. They toppled over together, onto one another, and a trembling Ignis clambered over a convulsing Noct, cupping his cheek with dirty hands to spare him from the hard marble floor while he coughed and spluttered for air. Gods—he was still cold and gray, but unmistakably alive.

“Noct—” Ignis’s elbow buckled and he caught himself on his forearm, his hand still tucked between Noct’s clammy cheek and the floor and his heart bursting with so much emotion he thought he would pass out from the sheer force of it alone.

Noct’s face was contorted in pain and discomfort but the coughing gradually subsided and the color slowly returned to his face. Ignis checked him for other injury when he was able to find a modicum of strength in his violently shaking bones, but all the wounds that either of them had suffered appeared to be gone.

At last Noct cracked an eye open, squinting through his scraggly hair against the sunlight that fell upon the dais, and he looked up at the man holding him. “Iggy…?”

A laugh escaped Ignis’s lips, and embarrassingly a spray of spittle with it. It was a bizarre response, perhaps, but he was so overcome with relief, with joy, with love, with trauma that he had little to no control over his own faculties. “I’m here.” He was still crying, mucus flowing from his nose in a most undignified manner, but he gathered Noct up into his arms heedless of all else and kissed his temple and stroked his tangled hair and whispered, “You did it. I’m here—we’re both here.”

Noct laboriously righted himself, and Ignis only noticed that their legs were tangled together when Noct attempted to extract his. He shifted to allow Noct room to sit up properly, the two of them facing each other, but found himself so reluctant to let go of him completely—and Noct, likewise, reluctant to be let go of—that their hands ended up settling into one another’s in what little space was left between them.

“ _We_ did it,” Noct corrected.

“Are you hurt?”

Noct withdrew his hands and rubbed at the finger donning the Ring of the Lucii with a curious furrow in his brow that had Ignis apprehensively anticipating a response in the affirmative, but he shook his head. “Sore… Tired. ...Thirty.”

A lilting, stuttering sigh escaped Ignis in a giddy vocalization caught awkwardly between laughter and relief. He cupped Noct’s face in both his hands and pressed their foreheads together. “Thank the bloody gods.”

“Noooct!”

“Iggy!!”

The throne room doors burst open and Gladio and Prompto poured through them, neither one stopping until all four were upon the dais, on the ground, clutching one another in front of the throne in a flurry of relieved proclamations and giddy laughter.

“You’re both okay?!”

“Oh my gods, the sun is out!”

“Holy shit, you really did it!”

“The daemons just vanished!”

“Is anyone hurt?!”

Amidst it all, Noct couldn’t stop laughing, clutching Gladio’s back with one hand and his other somewhere out of Ignis’s purview. The bear hug that Gladio enveloped them in crushed Ignis and Noct together, and Ignis wrapped one hand around Noct partly to keep him close and partly to prevent Gladio from pushing Ignis’s shoulder out of its socket. With his other hand, Ignis made a point to reach outward from the tangle of limbs and find Prompto, grasping at the air until his fingertips reached a sinewy arm, but Noct just kept nodding in response to their questions, and laughing, and there were tears in his eyes, and eventually the laughing gave way to unrestrained sobbing.

“It’s over… It’s really over.”

The four of them held each other like that for an indeterminate amount of time. When history recounted this moment years later—into the decades, into the centuries—they would one day say that the Chosen King reunited with his Swordsworn at the throne. They would note the date, and the year, and the victory itself, and they might even say that they had embraced. 

In films and theatrical plays, King Noctis would be played by rugged leading men who always made a poignant speech or a pithy one-liner at this part of the story, depending on the tone and the audience. It would always be an easy grab for a box office hit. The character of Gladio would become harder, and the character of Ignis would become softer, and no one would ever agree upon what precise ethnicity Prompto had been.

The standing lore would posit that a sunbeam had delivered Noctis directly from the Beyond to the throne, and the moral would declare that the sun itself had been rebirthed by the flame of love that had saved Eos, and realists would argue that all of that was unlikely to have actually occurred. In time, the story would shift the three Crownsguard to the lower dais, kneeling in respectful fealty while the ethereal figure of the King of Light alighted onto his regal throne, and different depictions would disagree on where precisely Ignis was positioned in the room. Art historians would go to academic war over it.

But none of that would ever compare to the reality of that moment, in which four weary friends clutched each other until their bones ached, covered in one another’s tears and sweat and blood while they wept on the floor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope that wasn't too cruel, lol. >.> Angsted over how to tag this to keep the suspense while still being honest...!
> 
> Anyway, thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed Part I of You Won’t Be Going Alone, but that isn’t the end of this story. Now that the world has been saved, there’s land to be reclaimed, civilization to be restored, and a kingdom to run. How will Noctis handle the next chapter of his life, and what role will Ignis play in it? Can the four nations of the new world get along? What are the rest of all our friends up to? Is Ebony still actually in production or is Ignis drinking 10 year old canned coffee? Will the Chosen King ever have time to go fishing again? And why did Noct give Ignis a heart attack by lingering behind in the Beyond? :)
> 
> I'm a slow writer but I'll set my target date for Part II around Noct's birthday, or maybe end of year if a lot of other projects come up. Please subscribe for updates!
> 
> And—don't worry—the rest of the story will be considerably more lighthearted, or at least balanced between good and angsty feels. xD


End file.
